“We do not see things as they are,” goes a saying attributed to Anaïs Nin, “we see them as we are.”
The origin of this saying is in doubt — some, including Nin herself, attribute it to the Talmud — but it expresses an important truth.
Psychological Fantasy and the Creation of the World
The world does not present itself to us with a pure objectivity. The world is created, so to speak, in the meeting of concrete external reality with the internal disposition of the individual. This meeting of inner and outer, of mind and matter, C.G. Jung calls the psyche.
For Jung, our experience is the result of the activity of psychological fantasy, by which he means something quite specific.
As I noted in a previous post, the psyche is a living reality for Jung. He is very clear, though, that psyche should not be identified with either the physical, material world nor with the merely intellectual realm of ideas.
Psychological fantasy is the result of the combination of these two different realms. And it is through fantasy that our experience becomes a “living psychological process” and obtains what he calls esse in anima, which could be translated as “being in soul” or “ensouled being.”
As Jung states:
“The psyche creates reality everyday. The only expression I could use for this activity is fantasy.”
In other words, our experience of reality is created by the activity of the psyche, which is the meeting ground for our mental life and the material world. These two are the seed and the egg coming together from which a “living reality” is formed and begins to emerge.
The Reality of Fantasy
Only when these two realms interpenetrate does life become truly ensouled. The name that Jung uses to describe this creative interpenetration of mind and matter is fantasy. But fantasy, in this sense, does not mean something unreal or untrue. It does not mean imaginary in the dismissive sense of the word as we commonly use it.
Fantasy, as Jung intends the word, is something very real and very effective. It is something that grips us as much in our feelings as in our thoughts, as much in the body as in the mind.
“Fantasy is just as much feeling as thinking, as much intuition as sensation. There is no psychic function that, through fantasy, is not inextricably bound up with the other psychic functions.”
In other words, the whole person is implicated and affected by fantasy!
It doesn’t take much reflection to know that this is true for all of us.
We have all, for instance, been gripped at one point in our lives by a powerful feeling for another person. Such a feeling can reach a high enough intensity that we cannot stop thinking about the other person.
We picture ourselves with them. Maybe we weep over them. We may even feel a tight knot in the stomach or the throat because of them.
This kind of experience holds true whether the feeling is love or hate. It is universal. When we are in the grip of an experience like this we realize that psychological fantasy is a full body sport!
Life Is But A Dream
When Jung says that “psyche creates reality,” what he is saying is that we do not live in a world of objective facts. We cannot know what things are like apart from our observation of them. And our observation of things is inevitably colored by what he calls the “personal equation.”
Simply put, the personal equation is the perspective that we bring to our encounter with the world, the lens through which we observe things. This includes such factors as culture, gender, socioeconomic status, education and temperament.
In other words, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
The fact that our experience is shaped by psychological fantasy ultimately implies that we are living in a world of psychic reality. Reality, in a sense, is as dream-like as a dream.
As Shakespeare once wrote, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” an idea echoed in that song we all learned by heart as children: “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.”
The Full Range of Psychological Fantasy
And like our dreams, sometimes the fantasies in which we find ourselves are raw, embarrassing, even shameful, such as when we are gripped by a feeling of jealousy, or selfishness, or greed.
But they can also be creative ideas of the greatest significance, or experiences that awaken our better angels — compassion, empathy, or deep love.
This, teaches Jung, is the full and normal range of human fantasy:
“Sometimes it appears in primordial form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our faculties combined.”
Becoming Conscious of Our Fantasies
That the world we live in is so deeply colored by psychological fantasy has a two-fold effect. It both lets us off the hook for our thoughts, feelings and reactions, while at the same time making us responsible for being conscious of those same reactions, and for how we respond and relate to them.
There is a story from the desert fathers — the Christian mystics and hermits of the fourth century — that expresses just this idea:
“A brother came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, ‘Abba, I have many thoughts and they put me in danger.’ The old man led him outside and said to him, ‘Expand your chest and do not breathe in.’ He said, ‘I cannot do that.’ Then the old man said to him, ‘If you cannot do that, no more can you prevent thoughts from arising, but you can resist them.’”
I would prefer if the ending read that we can ‘relate’ to our thoughts, rather than just ‘resist’ them. But the main point is this, rather than take a rigid and perfectionistic attitude to life and to ourselves, we need instead to adopt an attitude of curiosity.
Not “I should” or “I shouldn’t” or, even worse, “You should” or “They should”, but rather, “What is happening here? What is this moment teaching me, about myself, about the others in my life, about life itself?”
Another way to phrase this question is to ask, “What fantasy is at work in this moment?”
In this way we begin to read our life in the same way that we would look at a dream — as something meaningful, creative and full of mystery.
Each moment of living becomes an opportunity for self-knowledge and self-development. Each moment is an opportunity for growth.
By developing the sensitivity to see the ways in which the inner world and the external world interact; by learning to discern which psychological fantasy is coloring our perception of the world in the moment, life then becomes, as Jung describes it, a “living reality” — enlivened, enchanted, ensouled.
Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche. It is, pre-eminently, the creative activity from which the answers to all answerable questions come; it is the mother of all possibilities, where, like all psychological opposites, the inner and outer worlds are joined together in living union.
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