A therapy patient of mine recently sat thoughtfully for a few minutes, then exclaimed "Oh my God, I've been acting as if I really had power over all these things, as if I had the power to prevent bad things from happening."
"Yes you have," I said. "That's your good insight for the day."
"I've been doing this all my life. Am I crazy?"
"Not at all," I said. "You just discovered one of your underlying assumptions about things. We call them 'unconscious fantasies' - or we call them that until you become aware of them."
One of the rewards of my work is helping people discern their hitherto unattended-to, unexamined, "unconscious" operating principles. When these are held up to the light, it can be disorienting, humbling, and distressing for many to realize that much of their problematic or ineffective behavior has been determined by following a false map, as it were. To mix metaphors even further, to realize that they were standing on unsolid ground.
My very pleasant businesswoman patient came to the realization that one of her dominant operating principles was to keep everybody in her world, everyone she knew, safe from distress, worry, discomfort, disease, and misfortune. Not only did this principle run her ragged, but it often failed. When it failed, she blamed herself for not having done enough. The unconscious fantasy she uncovered might be called a "fantasy of omnipotence."
Everybody operates, to varying degrees, according to unconscious fantasies about themselves, others, and the world in general. Nobody is 100% in reality. Problems can arise depending on how far the hidden assumptions diverge from reality. Reality is the harshest teacher, and never spares the rod.
What are these things made of? Freud discovered/defined them, although writers and students of human nature have always been interested in the irrational consistencies of personality. Freud said that they are constructed from wishes, fears, hopes, dreams, experiences, temperaments, and especially defenses. I think that is true. During maturation, they become organized like pieces of mental software. Like the beating heart and the digesting bowel, they are part of what and who we are while operating outside our awareness.
Unfortunately, we cannot ask people what their deep operative fantasies are, because they are, by definition, unaware of them. That's where Psychoanalytic skills come in, like soul-surgeons, to try to biopsy and, perhaps, extract the problem software. However, our medical rule is primum non nocere so we try not to let the best become the enemy of the good-enough.
Fortunately, the human mind seems to have a relatively limited repertoire of unconscious fantasies, so we experts are expected to be able to identify them, in time. That's a topic for another post, maybe.
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