You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ethel Person has the admirable and rare ability to translate psychoanalytic therapy and theory into engaging, educational books for general readers. Like her (1988) Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion, Person's By Force of Fantasy is full of Introductory Lectures and New Introductory
Lectures for those who want to learn the Freudian basics and get some sense of what has happened in and to psychoanalysis since Freud, all in the context of a sophisticated and probing commentary on contemporary modes of living and loving. She should get a prize from her clinical colleagues for being such an effective antidote to the obfuscation and jargonized in-group writing that alienates psychoanalysts from the educated reading population, including those whom they seek to understand and treat.
But Ethel Person's virtues as a translator make her book a hard one to review, for she has two audiences, and she does better by the general one than by the professional one, which she also seeks to address in this book. The general audience can be urged to enjoy By Force of Fantasy step by step, because the opening tour of conceptual distinctions and definitions will prepare them to appreciate the types of fantasies people produce; their reasons for being secretive about their fantasies; their modes of acting them out; their strategies for connecting with others' fantasies and participating in cultural fantasies. Types, reasons, modes, and strategies are intelligently categorized, carefully listed, illustrated with multitudes of one-paragraph to one-page vignettes. As the book moves along from exploring individual's fantasies to parsing fantasies shared by two people or small groups right on out to socially shared fantasies and mythic constructions, the territory of fantasy and the book's subtitle—“How We Make Our Lives”—get thoroughly mapped.
The second, professional audience, on the other hand, might be directed to go straight to chapter 4, passing over the