Fantasy (psychology)

"[2] Other researchers and theorists[specify] find that fantasy has beneficial elements — providing "small regressions and compensatory wish fulfilments which are recuperative in effect.

[4] According to Sigmund Freud, a fantasy is constructed around multiple, often repressed wishes, and employs disguise to mask and mark the very defensive processes by which desire is enacted.

[5] The subject's desire to maintain distance from the repressed wish and simultaneously experience it opens up a type of third person syntax allowing for multiple entry into the fantasy.

This radical omission of the "I" position creates space for all those processes that depend upon such a center, including not only identification but also the field and organization of vision itself.

"[7] He compared such phantasising to the way a "nature reserve preserves its original state where everything ... including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate there as it pleases.

"These day-dreams are cathected with a large amount of interest; they are carefully cherished by the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity ... such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious.

"[10] Melanie Klein extended Freud's concept of fantasy to cover the developing child's relationship to a world of internal objects.

"[11] The term "fantasy" became a central issue with the development of the Kleinian group as a distinctive strand within the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and was at the heart of the so-called controversial discussions of the wartime years.

"A paper by Susan Isaacs (1952) on 'The nature and function of Phantasy' ... has been generally accepted by the Klein group in London as a fundamental statement of their position.

Lacan engaged from early on with "the phantasies revealed by Melanie Klein ... the imago of the mother ... this shadow of the bad internal objects"[17] — with the Imaginary.