The fantasy principle : psychoanalysis of the imagination / Michael Vannoy Adams.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [225]-236) and index.

1 The fantasy principle: imaginal psychology and the dethroning of "Mr. Reality". -- 2 Compensation in the service of individuation: phenomenological essentialism and Jungian dream interpretation. -- 3 Jungian post-structural theory: structures versus constructs, concepts versus images. -- 4 Mythological knowledge: just how important is it in Jungian (and Freudian) analysis?. -- 5 The "womanning" of Schreber: catastrophe, creation, and the mythopoeic forces of mankind. -- 6 Dreaming of the Ku Klux Klan: "race," culture, and history in psychoanalysis. -- 7 Jung, Africa, and the "geopathology" of Europe: psychic place and displacement. -- 8 Refathering psychoanalysis, deliteralizing Hillman: imaginal therapy, individual and cultural. -- 9 A baby is being eaten: a case of cannibalistic malpractice and suicide. -- 10 The importance of being blasphemous: profanation versus resacralization

'Contemporary psychoanalysis needs less reality and more fantasy. It needs a new principle--what Michael Vannoy Adams calls the "fantasy principle." Freud insists that we conform to the reality principle. He assumes that there is only one reality and that we all define it in exactly the same way. Reality, however, is not given. There are many "realities" and they are constructed from fantasies that occur in us continuously. Fantasy, Adams declares, is what transforms consciousness. This book...radically affirms the centrality of imagination....argues for the recognition of a new school of psychoanalysis--the school of "imaginal psychology." As Jung says, "Image is psyche."'