FACT AND PHANTASY
In the last chapter we emphasised the fact that one of the first
products of Narcissism was the infantile difficulty of distinguishing
between fact and phantasy, of realising the world outside oneself. This
tendency to mix up fact with phantasy is by no means only to be found
in an abnormal mind. It is present in some degree in all persons; each
one feels himself to be the most real thing present, and in feeling
this he has a tendency to believe that others round him are in some way
less real, though, fortunately, very few carry it far enough to imagine
that all the others are merely part of a dream in which the dreamer is
the only real figure, as the Red King in “Alice Through the Looking
Glass” is supposed to have done, when the remark is made to Alice,
“You’re only a sort of thing in his dream! If that there king was to
wake you would go out bang--just like a candle!”
And yet quite a large number of people find it difficult to realise
firstly, that they must die, and secondly that the rest of the world
will not die also when they die. They know, of course, that this
latter is not the case, yet they cannot look upon it as a commonplace
fact. Their Narcissism refuses to contemplate their own mortality. It
represses the fact and leaves the idea vague and unreal to them.
In children, the difficulty of distinguishing between phantasy and
reality is quite normally much more accentuated than in adults.
And since they start in a world of phantasy and their training is
to lead them to a world of reality, it is obvious that the halfway
stages will be obscured by a strange mixture of the two. All children
go through the stage in which phantasy and reality are by no means
clearly differentiated, and most young children succeed, day by day, in
fulfilling impossible wishes in phantasies in a manner which a properly
developed adult can never do.
A little boy desires to possess a pony; if this be impossible his
imagination gives life to a rocking-horse, and failing that he may
tie a piece of string to a chair, and with great pleasure and much
emotion urge on his fiery untamed steed across mountain and desert.
He fulfils his wishes immediately by means of a phantasy, which, for
the time being, successfully replaces reality. If this child grows up
normally, this possibility of phantastic fulfilment should gradually
disappear. How many adults, for instance, could take a bath-tub into
their dining-room, sit in it, and with the aid of a vivid imagination
thoroughly enjoy a pleasant sail at sea? We trust no one, at any
rate of our readers, for they would be of that type which has no
perspective, and they would most certainly fail in their vocation as
practical men and women. Yet remnants of phantasy thinking remain with
everyone, and in a moderate degree, so far as we know, such remnants do
but little harm if they are present in small measure only, and kept in
water-tight compartments.
Adult phantasy thinking very largely consists in what is known as
identification, which may be either conscious or unconscious. Of this,
we shall have more to say shortly. At the moment let us trace out what
should happen to the normal child as it grows older. Education and
environment should be gradually convincing the child of the unreality
of its phantastic thoughts and of its early world, should be inducing
it to think in terms of facts and to adjust himself to these facts,
instead of attempting the impossible task of adjusting these facts to
suit his own phantastic conceptions of them. The method of thought
which he should develop in order thus to fit himself to meet the
world adequately has been conveniently termed “directive thinking.”
Directive thinking is controlled thought based upon facts seen in their
true perspective, and with a purpose in view which is both definite
and possible. It is the very opposite of phantasy thinking, which is
generally indefinite, based upon a lack of perspective, and attempts
continually to obtain the fulfilment of wishes impossible of fulfilment.
In directive thinking, the purpose in view must be purposive to the
thinker, a change to be produced in the world, either in its happiness,
its morals, its commercial prosperity or in other forms of progress
or even of deterioration; or the purpose may be to effect changes in
the individual’s own happiness or prosperity, or it may be directed
towards a mental change in the thinker himself with no immediate idea
of changes in his external surroundings.
Thus a man may wish to improve his own character by eradicating a bad
habit. He may do this by thinking carefully about it, by analysing the
causes of the habit, by giving himself auto-suggestion in opposition to
the habit. All this, even if the habit may not in the end be eradicated
must be classed as directive thinking. _Directive thinking is thus
obviously, controlled thinking requiring an effort of attention and
concentration as opposed to phantasy thinking which knows but little
control save that of desire, and little effort or concentration._
In all the business of everyday life, directive thinking must be
employed; whether we are merely using our minds to decide the most
trivial problem, such as the best way of eradicating weeds from the
garden, or whether we are deciding upon a policy to be pursued in some
great commercial or political enterprise. Every time we use our brains
in directive thinking we are establishing a habit which gradually gives
us power to produce changes in our environment and in the world in
general. Every time we indulge in phantasy thinking we encourage the
habit of living in a world of our own ideas, and we are destroying the
habit which enables us to create in reality.
The two forms of thinking may, of course, overlap considerably. The
novelist or playwright, for instance, is very largely a phantasy
thinker. He may feel the emotions of the various phantasy characters
which he evolves, but in order to arrange the words and sentences,
and furthermore in having an idea to portray or in drawing attention
to evils which he thinks should be remedied, he is using considerable
energy in directive thought. So that it becomes obvious that directive
thought need not merely apply to the things of the immediate present
nor even the near future, and in trying to draw distinction between
the two, one is often confronted with a superficial criticism, that
certain ideas must pertain to phantasy thinking, because they can never
come to pass. That, however, is quite incorrect. The possibility that
an idea may come to fruition in two or three hundred years time, and
that the thoughts which have been given to the idea must assist its
growth and ripening, is sufficient to constitute these thoughts as
directive.
We must now look at the second important element in the child’s early
education, which would follow logically upon the first one that it
should be made to face the facts around it; and that is, that in its
games and occupations it should be encouraged, as far as possible, to
take lines of directive thought, and not obtain its pleasures through
phantasies only.
Thus, it would be much better to give him bricks to play with, so that
he may use directive thought in designing and building a house, than
to give him a ready-made toy, such as an engine wherewith he will
merely carry out the phantasy of being a driver or a passenger and of
travelling wheresoever he wishes. A toy wheel-barrow which he can take
into the garden and fill with real stones and earth is far better than
a doll which he will merely imagine to be something to be brought up
like himself, which he will endow with phantastic life and feelings
which are quite unreal. In fact, as far as possible, the child’s games
and occupations should involve his _doing_ something, rather than
merely imagining something. Of course, imagination and phantasy will
come into its games, and are bound to do so, but as much directive
thought as possible should be added.
The ordinary fairy-tale should be swept from the nursery; here the
child does nothing but identify himself with the hero or heroine in
the most impossible of situations of a purely phantastic type. There
is plenty of scope for giving a child an interest in stories from the
fairy-land of science, or from the lives of famous persons in the
centuries that have passed; all of which, if properly selected and
dressed up, will assist the child’s directive thought. For though
the facts with which the stories may deal are as wonderful as any of
Grimm’s fairy-tales, _they are facts of which the child will never
have to be undeceived, and he will never have to have his faith shaken
in the stories which he has learnt_; thus the child will learn from the
outset to think directively.
I know that many mothers, when they read this, will be inclined to
shake their heads and say to themselves, “Poor little darling, I could
never treat it so.” And that they will be inclined, as is shown very
early in this book, to say “These things cannot be true,” for they are
not the ideas they are accustomed to. Yet I can assure them that by
means of carrying out many of those actions and teachings which they
think are pleasant and harmless, they are really damning the child,
while many of these ideas which they might term cruel are really of
the greatest value and kindness to it. Moreover, experience has shown
that if diplomacy be used, the child will be as equally interested in
wonderful facts as in wonderful phantasies. The only difference is
that it is more trouble to the parent or educator to search out and
deal with facts himself. It is quite true that the child’s imagination
requires training, as part of its intellectual education. But there
is vast difference between encouraging it to imagine the possibility
of impossible things, and encouraging it to exercise its imagination
in realisation of facts, however far they may be removed from the
experience of everyday life. Many people have the idea that a child
should be encouraged to use its imagination; whereas in fact the
child’s imagination requires curbing, training, sublimating. Such
people do not realise that the early life of a child is lived almost
entirely in imagination, that it has no difficulty whatsoever in using
its imagination, and that the real difficulty is in preventing it from
using too much imagination directed into false channels and by-paths of
permanent unreality.