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Man must have his dreams—asleep they enable him to come to terms with his past, awake they help him to come to grips with the future. “Utopia … represents mankind's dream of happiness, its secret longing for the golden age, or, as others saw it, for its lost paradise.” (1) Utopias like the myth of Paradise are our dreams of the future. However, like all dreams they refer not only to the future but to the past and to the present as well.
Man has both a universal need to return periodically to the elemental matrix, temporarily at least, through some form of symbolic gratification, and at the same time a need to move away from this symbolic revival of the original mother-child symbiosis and push toward individuation and individuality. Weaning is not only imposed upon a child, it is an inherent condition of life to want to be independent and to grow. By definition, utopia is a fantasy, a fiction, which is concerned with the social and political structure of an ideal state rather than an actual one. The word was coined by Thomas More in 1516 (13), and it is made up of two words; antopia, which means “no land,” and entopia, which means “good land.” These two words combined give the idea of an ideal state that can never quite exist. And in all utopias we may discern these two functions—one to progress and one to regress. Thus, utopias may be the enthusiasm-arousing guide to action which permits adaptation or they may be merely the defense against impending disaster. They may restore some form of paradise by leading to the new deed which changes the world by becoming political guideposts for action. Or they may be the hallucination which is the beginning of psychic illness and leads to destruction. Schizophrenic patients frequently write down a multitude of utopia-like fantasies (2) in an unsuccessful attempt to ward off the impending catastrophe. But when utopias