Fantasy

  I even make an effort to second the patient in his fantasies.  Truth to tell, I have no small opinion of fantasy.  To me, it is the maternally creative side of the masculine mind.  When all is said and done, we can never rise above fantasy.  It is true that there are unprofitable, futile, morbid, and unsatisfying fantasies whose sterile nature is immediately recognized by every person endowed with common sense; but the faulty performance proves nothing against the normal performance.  All the works of man have their origin in creative imagination.  What right, then, have we to disparage fantasy?  In the normal course of things, fantasy does not easily go astray; it is too deep for that, and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal instinct.  It has a surprising way of always coming out right in the end.  The creative activity of imagination frees man from his bondage o the “nothing but” and raises him to the status of one who plays.  As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is at play.  TPoP 46