Carl Gustav Jung on the classification of fantasies

Abstract

The main theme of the article is the phenomenon of fantasy from the perspective of anthropological thought. The author sees fantasy as one of the most important and multi-faceted anthropological phenomena. Fantasy is involved in all the spheres of human life. Weaving into strict scientific thought, it significantly enriches the knowledge. It has powerful compensatory function, allowing you to embody many unfulfilled desires in dreams. Fantasy can have hedonistic nature, it can cause aesthetic pleasure, as evidenced by art.
Human dreams are countless, they are unique, they have originality in their expression. This complicates the analysis of fantasy in the anthropological aspect. In the history of philosophy there have been various attempts to systematize the fantasies. The author guided by the works of C.G. Jung gives the anthropological classification of fantasies. As a result, there arise three kinds of fantasies on the basis of their appearance.
The first is fantasy, which arise in the collision of man with the external, surrounding reality. People are constantly changing the world around them, making plans, dreaming, trying to imagine their future, and are navigating in their lives largely due to their fantasies. C.G. Jung shows that fantasy, as “spontaneous action of the psyche”, in contact, in the interaction with reality, is constant creative act, and is able largely to fill in the lacks of life. Life not always meets human aspirations, and dreams are much more than the possibilities of their implementation in reality. In fantasy a person can fill in the lack of life, the dream has great compensatory power. However, fantasy can be dangerous in its extreme detachment from reality, immersing person in a complex, tangled procession of illusions that prevent the high-grade existence. But there are fantasies, for which reality has almost no meaning. These are fantasies of the second kind generated by the inner world of man, by the diversity of his feelings. Sublime poetic dream is able to draw worlds that have no relationship to the world, but are directly related to the profound states of the human soul. Speaking about this kind of fantasies, Jung largely relies on the philosophical tradition of romanticism. In these dreams people are able to penetrate their own inner world, to have access to their deep sensual states. It can be the sense of freedom of their lives, the fear of death, the contemplation of glorified beauty. Fantasy creates a completely different reality, which main value is the creative freedom of the human spirit.Fantasies as a product of the collective unconscious become the subject of the third part of the article. Jung found that many people’s fantasies have deep historical roots. Such fantasies expressed the content of the collective unconscious. The accumulated, crystallized experience of mankind transmitted through the fantasies of myths, legends and various tales. In this perspective, fantasy becomes the common heritage in works of art, but also transfers to modern man a concentrated mental experience of our ancestors through the centuries. We may find that in some myths (e.g., about Hero) orfairy tales (Beauty and the Beast) the stages of development of the psyche of any person are symbolically encrypted. The author shows that C.G. Jung in his works examined at length all three kinds of fantasies. Moreover, such a classification suggests that fantasy is one of the most significant phenomena of man. No other creature possesses such a well-developed and versatile fantasy.Fantasy is expressed the uniqueness, originality, eccentricity of man.