Fantasy is the creative power of the thinking consciousness and serves as a creative element for empathy, arts and any kind of problem solving. In his day, Sigmund Freud saw fantasy as an outlet for drive satisfaction. Today, for psychology, fantasy is primarily an alternative processing of reality.
What is fantasy?
Fantasy is the creative power of the thinking consciousness and serves as a creative element for empathy, arts and any kind of problem solving. In psychology, the human mind is called thinking consciousness and is the sum of all inner processes. Besides thoughts and feelings, it includes evaluated perceptions or memories. The thinking consciousness is said to have its own creative power. Thus it can produce after-effects of a perception, although just no perception took place. This ability of the consciousness is called fantasy by psychology. According to Wilhelm Wundt, fantasy is thinking in sensual single ideas or images. Fantasy is thus a creative ability associated with memory images as well as imagination images. However, it also refers to linguistic or logical ideas that require some imagination. Through imagination, an inner world is created from inner images, the result of which is called phantasm. In neuroscience, imagination, creativity, and inventiveness have been considered rather unexplored areas. However, recent research has shown that imagination, in the context of creativity, engages the brain‘s memory store. Meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex behaves quietly so that information from the memory system can be recombined.
Function and task
As a production force of consciousness, imagination is a special form of reality processing. It designs alternatives to reality and can fulfill various needs in the process. Fantastic alternatives, for example, allow people to increase their personal space of experience. Fantasy, on the other hand, also allows people to anticipate future consequences. Finally, creative power can act as a substitute satisfaction. A damaged self-confidence can be compensated in fantasy with daydreams or utopias, for example. In this way, fantasy stabilizes the sense of well-being and narcissistic balance. Shameful experiences are repelled at the same time. Sigmund Freud suspected drive impulses behind fantasies. According to his conviction, unexpressed and suppressed drives are compensatorily acted out in fantasy. Thus, the creative power of consciousness serves as an instrument for the satisfaction of desire and, according to psychodynamic ideas, is, so to speak, merely a valve of drive satisfaction. In early experiments in psychology this assumption had apparently been confirmed. Students acted out their aggression after insults, for example, in fantasy. More recent research in the psychology of learning, however, shows contrary results. A consensus now exists about the high utility of fantasy for interpersonal empathy. Thus, understanding another person is largely dependent on imagination. At the same time, science agrees on the creative element of imagination. Fantasies are even considered an essential prerequisite for art and are understood to be the source of creativity. Fantasy also plays a role in purposeful action. In problem solving, for example, people need an idea of how to solve the problem. The goal of action is visualized as a purpose or desire, so that purposeful action is possible. In the sciences, imagination also enables cognition. The ability is relevant, for example, for the synthesis of findings and empirical observations, which provide a certain significance only through interpretive work.
Diseases and ailments
Fantasy space differs from person to person. Thus, the capacity for extensive fantasizing is not equally strong in everyone and is probably related to intellect as well as to self-control and, above all, to the possibility of diverse experiences. For psychology, fantasizing plays a role especially when it assumes abnormal proportions. This is the case, for example, with violent fantasies or even killing fantasies. Regular killing fantasies are now associated with school rampages, for example.Aggression and violence are thereby regarded as a cognitive script that is maintained in particular by media influences and negative interpersonal experiences. In particular, early socialization experiences are relevant for violent fantasies. For example, children with behavioral problems show more violent fantasy play than their peers. Predominantly, children with low self-control are affected by the abnormal fantasies. Social interactions seem to trigger the fantasies. In particular, this is true for those interactions that the affected person experiences as threatening or humiliating. The violent fantasies are thereby a kind of reaction to a perceived loss of control in the social environment. By fantasizing about future acts of violence, the affected person often feels in control again and thus reduces the feeling of stress. Some authors speak of this as a coping strategy with aggressive impulses that serve to reduce aggression. On the other hand, studies show that the fantasies tend to increase aggressive behavior in the future. A particular danger is always present when the affected person abuses his violent fantasies as a regular escape from reality and allows himself to be carried away to a progressive loss of reality. Not only violent fantasies, but extensive fantasies of any kind can correspond to an escape from reality and initiate progressive loss of reality. Traumatizing experiences can promote this loss of reality. Young rape victims, for example, often construct a fantasy world into which they can retreat in order not to have to experience the traumatic situation in full consciousness. Presumably, neurological disorders or injuries can also cause abnormal, abnormally strong, or abnormally diminished fantasies. However, because of the paucity of research in this area, this relationship is comparatively unclear to date.
