Freud and fantasy

For Freud, fantasy refers to a psychic domain, no less important – indeed no less real – than the world we live and move in; but distinguished from that world by the fertility, the potentially endless transformative capacities of the mind. We use fantasy, conscious and unconscious, to explore things that have not happened and never will, to see in our mind’s eye worlds out of reach. In fantasy, we are capable of thoughts, often terrifying and exhilarating, that we never dreamed we had (‘I wouldn’t dream of it’ is, for psychoanalysis, a classic instance of denial, our way of partially recognising something we can bear to acknowledge only as a dream). If asked to express them consciously, we would never dare