Is Fantasy Good for You? Fantasy vs. Lies vs. Delusion vs. Confabulation

Science and enlightenment were failed experiments. Now we are reverting to Middle Ages: from the reality principle to fantasy.

Fantasy vs. Lies vs. Delusion vs. Confabulation

There are two types of fantasy defense: person-centred and process-centred. This taxonomy is similar to substance-centred vs. process-centred addictions. The person at the center of a person-centred fantasy is akin to an addictive substance at the core of a substance-centred fantasy.

Not all process-centred fantasies are healthy. Narcissists and psychopaths are lazy because of their fantasies: they pursue shortcuts, feel entitled (grandiosity), are possessed by magical thinking. Fake it till you make it.

All fantasies are psychological defenses against an unbearable reality. But what renders the world so intolerable? Its threatening nature.

Undergirding all fantasies is a master delusion: “I am fragile, at risk of losing my mind, falling apart at the seams, an ideal victim of people or circumstances, an unworthy or bad object, doomed to fail.”

What gives rise to such a self-negating and catastrophizing scenario of precarity?

Parental overprotectiveness or, its opposite, neglect. Both types of caregiving misconduct yield all-pervasive mistrust of life and of the very possibility of justice, patterned order, and stable structure.

There are two types of fantasy defense: person-centred and process-centred.

Fantasies are intended to provide safe spaces and outlets for aggressive and self-destructive impulses involved in the civil war between the need to be seen (grandiosity) and the internalized bad object (“I am inadequate, an impostor, and unworthy”). Dysregulation and identity disturbance are the outcomes of this inner strife.

When in touch with reality, these voices create coalitions which lead to adverse outcomes. For example: spectacular, public, and attention-grabbing self-destruction.

Fantasies which revolve around another person - common in intimate or interpersonal relationships - inevitably dissolve into reality and therefore mayhem.

Fantasies which are founded on a narrative or an impersonal process - self-aggrandizing or self-destructive as they may be - never do. They are self-contained and well regulated.

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