Bruce Tift’s book, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation, will shock your eyes wide open when you grasp how directly it speaks to our most confusing neurotic complexes, the ones most of us have, unless we’re already enlightened or too numbed to notice. Tift uses “fantasy” a lot, primarily to refer to the beliefs underlying our stories—the internal, self-referential narratives we deploy as we rationalize, ruminate on, and try to fix our “problems.” These stories are undergirded by a fantasy belief in an essential, flawed self. He describes how to let go of the fantasy of fixing, the fantasy of resolution, which is only an entertaining distraction from the reality of our embodied experience of constant flow and change. He talks about how we come to fear intensity of feeling in childhood, when it really is a threat, and we develop adaptive strategies of defense to make ourselves feel safe that then become outdated but which we still use as adults:
Carl Jung once said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” I agree with him, though I would say neurosis is always a substitute for experiential intensity. … One of the things I like about Jung’s understanding is that it characterizes neurosis as an activity of intelligence (which is not synonymous with wisdom). It’s not pathological; it’s not some pattern that blindly got put into place. Neurosis is not something that happened to us. It’s an unconscious choice we make, moment after moment. It’s what happens when we say, “I would actually prefer not to feel this incredibly difficult, vulnerable, disturbing experience right now, so I’m going to try to go around it. I will distract myself. I’ll be self-aggressive. I’ll get very activated. I’ll get involved with parenting, or with work. I’ll learn to meditate and be calm. I’ll exercise.” But … the pain and intensity we’re experiencing is probably going to come and go all of our lives. As children, this choice was often the best we could do. As adults, it’s an expression of a basic lack of trust in ourselves. (33–34)
Fear of intense feelings, especially negative ones, fuels fantasies of finally fixing, reforming, and furnishing ourselves so that we no longer feel them. Any resistance to the reality of embodied, dependent, and vulnerable existence takes form as fantasy.
This base layer of the self-making mind is where Jung places fantasy: “As a chicken naturally lays an egg, a human psyche fantasizes… Our dreams are prior to our thinking.”
I heard these lines spoken by James Hillman, as he quoted from Jung’s The Red Book, in a lecture (which Nona Orbach sent me because it related so closely to some ideas she’s exploring in a new book I’m working on with her; thank you for this cross-pollination, Nona!). Jung’s notion of fantasy in this sense is like the Buddhist idea of delusion: “Psyche creates reality every day.” In Jung’s sense, then, the imaginative faculty of the psyche, its most natural activity, creates not fantasy as distortion of reality but what we call reality.
Because I also just read some Anaïs Nin, this notion seemed laced with danger. The blurring of fantasy and reality—is it an imperative drive toward self-actualization regardless of the destruction and annihilation in its path? Or was Nin only more realistic about the self-aggression of repressing one’s desires? She didn’t want to hurt those men… she wanted to love them, each in their own way. She saw with acute accuracy how their fantasies impinged on her and hers on them and did make their realities.
This destructive, damaging aspect of fantasy may be what gives the word’s current definition its pejorative tinge. According to Merriam-Webster, the primary meaning of fantasy is:
1: the power or process of creating especially unrealistic or improbable mental images in response to psychological need;
also : a mental image or a series of mental images (such as a daydream) so created
What interests me here is the implied clarity of the delineation between fantasy and reality. In this standard usage, fantasy is “especially unrealistic” and “improbable”—as in “that’s just a fantasy” or in Billie Eilish’s new song, played repeatedly by my daughter, who surely doesn’t understand the capsule critique of “male fantasy” in the first verse because she’s too young. In my recent readings, fantasy appears in a more pervasive but also more nuanced, modulated light.
In its earlier forms, it carried less of a negative valence and was more aligned to our sense of “imagination,” (which makes me think of Coleridge on fancy, which he saw as an inferior cousin to creative imagination). Here’s a brief etymological history, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:
Middle English fantasie, fantsy, fansey “the imagination as a faculty, mental image produced by this faculty, deluded notion, figment of the imagination, preference directed by caprice rather than reason, liking,” borrowed from Anglo-French fantasie “imagination as a faculty, figment of the imagination, dizziness,” borrowed from Late Latin phantasia “imagination as a faculty, mental image of something perceived physically, image evoked by a poet or orator, a thing imagined by someone sleeping or ill, delusion,” going back to Latin, “imagined situation or experience.”
I’m interested in the shift from the neutral “mental image” definitions to those associated with negatively judged delusion and caprice. I wonder why this happened. Earlier still, the word evokes simply something that is present to consciousness:
borrowed from Greek phantasía “appearance, presentation to consciousness (whether immediate or in memory), image, imagination as a faculty, imagery,” noun derivative corresponding to phantázein “to make visible, present to the eye or mind, (middle voice) place before one’s mind, picture to oneself, imagine,” causative verb from phantós “visible,” verbal adjective of phaínō, phaínein (active voice) “to bring to light, cause to appear,” and phaínomai, phaínesthai (middle voice) “to become visible, come to light, appear…”
Linguistic history shows a long conflation of mentalizing with visualizing: imagining is making images of. Visualizing is our concrete basis for understanding: “I see!” Ideas appear in the mind. We hold things in the “mind’s eye.” And what makes seeing possible? Light. In fantasy’s earlier history, we come to Indo-European:
*bh-né-h2-/bh-n̥-h2- (whence also Armenian banam “(I) open, reveal”), nasal present from *bheh2- “shine, give light, appear,” whence Sanskrit bhā́ti “(it) shines, beams.”
This Sanskrit origin, this action “shines, beams” captures the most basic phenomenon of mind, in which the knowing and known are like light. Holding something in one’s mind is like turning toward light or bringing light to it. The light of awareness brings it into existence, fantasy is just how we see reality, or as Jung says, “Psyche creates reality”—which is not to say we shouldn’t strive to wake up and see more skillfully.
