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A friend recently asked me to read the draft of his third novel (Kleiger, 2025). I enjoyed the first two, and I quickly agreed. This one was a sequel to his second novel, and I was eager to find out what happened to its characters, who had come alive for me. Naturally, my friend wanted feedback, posing detailed questions. That created an unexpected dilemma for me, which led to a new realization about why I read fiction. It's to enter an imaginary mental space that goes back to when my mother read me the Wizard of Oz (Baum, 1900–1920) books as bedtime stories, when I was 4. So, I read fiction nostalgically, recapturing those beloved experiences of the world of the imagination, on my journey toward sleep and dreams. My transference toward fiction contains an early, idealized maternal transference. Suggesting changes to my friend's draft seemed more than simply chutzpadik and arrogant. It meant viewing the authorial wizard as the mere mortal behind the curtain.
I know I am not alone in suspending disbelief when I enter the world of fiction. Psychoanalysts are fully capable of regressing into the realm of make-believe. When Lorraine Bracco spoke to a 2001 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association about playing her psychiatrist character Dr. Jennifer Melfi, on the hit television series The Sopranos (Chase et al., 1999–2007), so many audience members asked her advice about clinical dilemmas they faced that she had to remind them she was merely an actor, whose lines were written by screenwriters.