Phantasia
I am thinking of a fantasy of mine: I leave the world behind that I currently work in and become a captain of a scuba diving boat. The divers have just gone under the water and I can see their bubbles disrupting the surface all around me. It’s calm and sunny, with turquoise water of different shades all around me. It smells of salt and soft music plays over the handheld radio taped to a railing.
The boat rocks from side to side and I breathe in slowly. For the next hour I will let the boat drift along with the current, keeping a lazy eye out for the buoys that the divers will eventually send up during the end of their dive. Peace. Solitude.
Clients often share their fantasies, eventually. First we have to work through the connotations of the word itself: fantasy. It seems imbued with sexuality and immorality, and for many that is exactly where their imagination goes. But the root of the word is from an old French word: fantasie, which goes back even further to the Greek phantasia, meaning “imagination” or appearance”.
Now we are getting somewhere. Imagination and appearance. The gap between what seems to be and what could be. That sentence alone is the shoreline of many a heartache.
So why talk about fantasies in sessions? There are plenty of reasons, and I’m sure that Freud would go about it slightly differently, but the one that I am interested in is that our fantasies reveal our pain, if we are willing to look closer.
The client who fantasized about the kind woman at his daughter's gymnastics class. They imagined not a sexual moment, but a calm one: where he sat on the couch and watched a game of Sunday football while the sunlight warmed the room and the kind woman sat at his side, content and present.
Another imagined a fire burning down her office building to the last scrap of a 2x4, somehow including all digital data as well, so there was nothing to use to rebuild the company. She’d be free at last to buy the trailer, load up her dog, and drive to Glacier.
A veteran client imagined being back on base in Bagram, Afghanistan. He’d hear the warning sirens sound that a missile strike was underway and need to take shelter at his post. “I would rather face down a rocket than my own family, anyday” he admitted to me.
Perhaps another story comes to mind: the temptations of Christ in his 40 days in the wilderness. At the end of his fast he is presented with three separate invitations, three separate fantasies, to tempt him. Stones into bread, safety from harm, and conditional rule of the earth. In this case the fantasies are presented as temptations from outside himself, and it is worth considering that this may also the case for us, at times.
I would guess that you are already seeing it: that the phantasia is not about the thing itself, but acts as a trailhead to the current pain. The first is longing for kindness and peace in his own marriage, the second feels trapped and has lost the ability to see a way to change through their own means, the third longs to feel capable and clear in their responsibilities, and little kids make us all feel out of our depth at times.
My own phantasia is an invitation to be curious about why I feel unable to rest in my regular life, why solitude sounds relieving, and perhaps why I might benefit from some gentle rocking (which is healing for trauma).
May you be curious about your own images of relief. When you picture what could be instead of what is, ask the second question: what pain is this exposing that I have been ignoring?
