It is a common mistake to think reality and fantasy inhabit separate spheres. They don’t. They coexist and intermingle. Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable. To embrace dreams and make peace with spectacle doesn’t mean you have to abandon your faith in a politics ruled by reason. It means you acknowledge that it’s only a faith. Perhaps people can, and probably should, study the reality of the world, make reasoned political judgments and act accordingly. But this way of seeing and being doesn’t have any taken-for-granted epistemological foundation. It is, to use academic jargon, a system of discourse that must be (re)created, imagined, operationalized and dramatized to appeal to the public’s imagination.

HILLMAN: Look. Our assumption, our fantasy, in psychoanalysis has been that we’re going to process, we’re going to grow, and we’re going to level things out so that we don’t have these very strong, disturbing emotions and events.

VENTURA: Which is probably not a human possibility.

HILLMAN: But could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?

VENTURA: What?

HILLMAN: Could—

VENTURA: —could the consulting room be a cell in which revolution is prepared? Jesus. Could it?

HILLMAN: By revolution I mean turning over. Not development or unfolding, but turning over the system that has made you go to analysis to begin with—the system being government by minority and conspiracy, official secrets, national security, corporate power, et cetera. Therapy might imagine itself investigating the immediate social causes, even while keeping its vocabulary of abuse and victimization—that we are abused and victimized less by our personal lives of the past than by a present system.

It’s like, you want your father to love you. The desire to be loved by your father is enormously important. But you can’t get that love fulfilled by your father. You don’t want to get rid of the desire to be loved, but you want to stop asking your father; he’s the wrong object. So we don’t want to get rid of the feeling of being abused—maybe that’s very important, the feeling of being abused, the feeling of being without power. But maybe we shouldn’t imagine that we are abused by the past as much as we are by the actual situation of “my job,” “my finances,” “my government”—all the things that we live with. [A personal example of my own.—B.S.] Then the consulting room becomes a cell of revolution, because we would be talking also about, “What is actually abusing me right now?” That would be a great venture, for therapy to talk that way.

VENTURA: Let’s double back a second. You said, “Could analysis have new fantasies about itself?” What do you mean by fantasy? For most people that word’s associated with “unreal.”

HILLMAN: Oh, no, no. Fantasy is the natural activity of the mind. Jung says, “The primary activity of psychic life is the creation of fantasy.” Fantasy is how you perceive something, how you think about it, react to it.

VENTURA: So any perception, in that sense, is fantasy.

HILLMAN: Is there a reality that is not framed or formed? No. Reality is always coming through a pair of glasses, a point of view, a language—a fantasy.

VENTURA: But if therapy is to take this new direction, have this new perception or fantasy about itself, it seems we need some basic redefinition of some basic concepts. [p. 38-39]

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