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In her masterful new book, Ethel S. Person, M.D., noted psychoanalyst, author, and teacher, writes about conscious fantasy, a phenomenon that, although not heretofore unexplored, has surely been underexplored in the psychoanalytic literature. Person's central thesis is that fantasy is a major adaptational mode of humankind. She develops this thesis along an axis that extends from the intrapsychic to the culturohistorical, and, in the process, takes the reader on a wonderfully rich and stimulating journey.
The first part of Person's book is devoted to conscious fantasies (daydreams) in their intrapsychic locus. She establishes an approach to classifying fantasies, a framework over which she drapes a wealth of material drawn from clinical work, donated fantasies, and extensive scholarly research. Fantasies are characterized according to their commonalities of covertness, content, duration (both in length and through the life cycle), and psychic function and meaning.
Describing the attainment of the capacity to fantasize as a vital developmental achievement, Person liberates conscious fantasy from confinement to the sector of the trivial as well as from confinement to the sector of the psychopathological. To Person, fantasy not only serves to regulate and contain painful emotions, providing compensation for unresolved conflicts and solacing old wounds; it also invigorates hopes for the future, by postulating change for the better.
To separate backward-looking fantasies from forward-looking fantasies,