Introduction

Fantasy has always been a central element in human psychological life, functioning as a mechanism for emotional regulation, symbolic processing, and imaginative exploration. From the earliest days of psychoanalysis to modern phenomenological considerations, the role of fantasy has been studied extensively, revealing its healthy, adaptive, and potentially pathological dimensions.

In contemporary society, with pervasive exposure to ultra-realistic visual images — smartphones, social media, instant communication — the balance between fantasy and reality has significantly shifted. This shift has profound long-term implications for individuals prone to daydreaming, alienation, dissociation, and, in some cases, psychosis.

It has been observed that this shift can also trigger pathological thoughts, sometimes leading to projection or to the emergence of aggressive tendencies.

This article traces the historical understanding of fantasy, examines its development in psychoanalytic theory, and explores its modern healthy and pathological extensions.

Historical Development of the Concept of Fantasy in Psychoanalysis

Fantasy as a psychological concept was first systematically explored during the early days of psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud understood fantasy largely in relation to wish fulfillment and unconscious conflict. Dreams, daydreams, and neurotic symptoms were seen, in his view, as expressions of unmet desires and unresolved psychic tensions.

Carl Gustav Jung viewed fantasy, particularly in dreams and active imagination, as a means of integrating unconscious material into consciousness. For Jung, fantasy carried symbolic meaning and was central to the individuation process.

Alfred Adler conceptualized fantasy as connected to aspiration and compensation for feelings of inferiority. He emphasized its socially embedded and goal-oriented nature.

Melanie Klein placed fantasy at the core of very early psychic life. She defined and explored internal objects and several mental mechanisms, including introjection and projection, as well as what she described as the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In Kleinian theory, fantasy was not a secondary mental activity but an entity actively engaged in structuring internal reality, capable of both protecting and persecuting the self.

Post-Kleinian theorists, including Otto Kernberg, further elaborated the concept of fantasy in relation to personality organization and pathological defense mechanisms, particularly within borderline and narcissistic structures. Fantasy was understood as an organizing principle of internal object relations, capable of external enactment and interpersonal disruption.

Across these traditions, a consistent theme emerges: fantasy is inseparable from human existence. It is essential to psychic life, yet structurally capable of becoming pathological under certain conditions. These conditions may sometimes be linked to emotional vulnerability, unreasonable family expectations, or significant environmental pressures.

Fantasy and Modern Media: The Phenomenological Shift

Historically, fantasy existed within buffered symbolic environments. Books, letters, film, and later television allowed imaginative engagement accompanied by temporal delay and reflective distance.

Contemporary technological developments have radically altered this previously well-defined psychic ecology.

Smartphones and social media provide constant ultra-realistic exposure to news, media, information, and visual imagery. Individuals encounter curated (often false) realities, live events, and deliberately aestheticized identities without adequate symbolic mediation or respite.

Reality is now encountered at great speed — instantly — and only later interpreted, if at all. Perceptual saturation overwhelms the mind with words, sound, imagery, and significant affective stimulation, thereby reducing the individual’s capacity for digestion and reflection.

In other words, we are driven to watch, listen, and follow relentlessly whatever is newly delivered to us. There are always new images, new tracks, new words, or new information that we feel compelled to follow as soon as they appear. There is often no time to process or properly register what was seen on the screen only moments before.

In psychologically stable individuals, fantasy continues to serve important adaptive functions:

• Providing distance from immediate reality
• Offering respite from daily stressors and anxieties
• Supporting symbol formation at a slower pace and enabling firmer emotional regulation
• Strengthening the perceptual differentiation between fantasy and reality

In vulnerable individuals, however, these mechanisms may fail more rapidly and more severely, giving rise to pathological outcomes.

Psychosis and Fantasy

In psychotic states, the boundary between internal fantasy and external reality becomes unstable.

Fantasy may lose its symbolic function and be directly enacted. It has been observed that intense and continuous ultra-realistic media exposure can intensify internal saturation, accelerating delusional formations and perceptual confusion.

Psychotic retreat often involves withdrawal into internally generated worlds, accompanied by hallucinations, delusions, or symbolic conflation and sometimes equation of internal fantasy with lived reality. Contemporary media environments can exacerbate and accelerate this process by supplying endless, voluminous material that becomes incorporated into psychotic structures.

Dissociation and Fantasy

Dissociation represents a fragmentation of consciousness, often mediated through a rich fantasy life.

Fantasy may function as a protective shield against overwhelming affect or experienced trauma. In modern contexts, deliberate and compulsive engagement with virtual worlds, avatars, AI influencers, bots, and online identities can externalize and significantly accelerate these dissociative processes.

While initially regulating, this externalization may hinder healthy internal integration, reinforcing identity fragmentation and emotional detachment from what would otherwise be an embodied experience.

Schizoid Retreat, Projection, and the Paranoid-Schizoid Position

Within Kleinian theory, the paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by splitting, projection, denial, displacement, and a range of other primitive defenses.

Fantasy may be externalized onto others, serving as a vehicle for aggression, envy, malice, or a pathological desire for control. Contemporary media can significantly amplify these tendencies by intensifying comparison with online objects, driving severe idealization, and subsequently turning toward destructive devaluation.

Social media environments facilitate projection onto mediated others and fertilize it across many interactive digital spaces. For some individuals, this process may escalate into perverse enactments or aggressive behaviors directed toward the self or others.

This is where such developments may become seriously harmful and, in certain cases, dangerous.

The Pathological Extension of Fantasy in Contemporary Life

In its healthy form, fantasy serves two primary functions: detachment from immediate reality and respite from psychological strain.

When excessive, relentless, and without respite, fantasy may dominate consciousness and lose its adaptive quality.

Modern media environments contribute to this distortion by promoting unattainable ideals of beauty, permanent success, and everlasting youth.

Pathological outcomes may include:

• Self-harm or neglect arising from conflict between internal fantasy and external reality
• Distorted identity formation with overinvestment in avatars, influencers, or aestheticized selves
• Malignant fantasy evolving into perversion, followed by aggressive, compulsive, externalized, highly sexualized deviant behavior
• Intensified fear of aging, bodily decline, and relational inadequacy
• Inseparable dependence on AI influencers and digital entities, experienced as substitutes for real-life human contact

Under such conditions, deviant fantasy spirals out of control and no longer regulates affect but amplifies psychic distress.

Individuals may therefore develop depression, dissociation, social alienation, and, in more severe cases, self-harm, perversion, or sexualized aggressive behavior.

Integration with Clinical Practice

For contemporary psychoanalytic psychotherapy, understanding the function of fantasy is essential.

Clinical work may involve:

• Assessing whether fantasy is adaptively symbolic or malignant and pathological
• Creating, stimulating, rebuilding, and restoring symbolic processing and reflective capacity
• Addressing exposure to online entities, relentless visual content, and perceptual overload
• Supporting and strengthening the thinking process, separating it from overwhelming emotional experience
• Facilitating integration of dissociated or projected material whenever possible

The aim is not the elimination of fantasy, but the restoration of its healthy, balanced, symbolic, regenerative, and restorative role.

Conclusion

Fantasy remains a foundational mental mechanism of the human psyche. Yet within an era of immersive, ultra-realistic audiovisual media, its function has shifted in profound ways.

For individuals vulnerable to serious mental disturbance — including psychosis, dissociation, and severe projective dynamics — fantasy may become pathological, externalized, or dangerously enacted.

Tracing fantasy from its psychoanalytic origins to its contemporary manifestations allows for a deeper understanding of modern psychopathology. In the quest for effective and meaningful treatment, psychotherapists must integrate historical insight with phenomenological awareness in order to support psychological stability within an increasingly perceptually saturated world.

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