'Fantasy' and 'reality'

[Triton]

For psychology, "fantasy" and "reality" change places and values.
First, they are no longer opposed. Second, fantasy is never merely
mentally subjective but is always being enacted and embodied. This
means that fantasy is always physical; it is a mode of being in the
world. We cannot be in the physical world without at the same time
demonstrating an archetypal structure. We cannot move or speak or feel
without enacting a fantasy. Our fantasies are not only in the mind; we
are behaving them.

Third, the union of fantasy and behaviour means that there is no pure,
no objective behaviour as such. Behaviour may never be taken on its
own level, literally. It is always guided by imaginal processes and
expresses them.

As creatures of fantasy we become more psychopathological when we
miss, in this or that segment of our lives, the fantasy in what we are
doing or that what we are fantasying is physically happening, even if
subtly and indirectly. Instead we literalize, and the metaphor, that
which keeps life psychologically intact, breaks apart. As extreme
examples we have, on the one hand, literalized behaviour called
psychopathy or behaviour disorder for which rape is sometimes
considered a symptom.

We become less psychopathological when we can restore the metaphorical
appreciation of what is going on. Therapy speaks of "psychological
insight", which would mean the reconnection of fantasy with behaviour,
and the dissolution of literalism through the practice of insight.

Fourthly, and consequently, whatever is physically or literally 'real'
is also a fantasy image. Thus the world of so-called hard factual
reality is always also the display of a specifically shaped fantasy,
as if to say, along with Wallace Stevens, the American philosopher-
poet of imagination, there is always "a poem at the heart of things."

[By Patricia Berry]