Fantasy: The Experiencer and the Interpreter (original) (raw)

1975, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

SYCHOLOGY of religion still has an "alien" status for many within the disciplines loosely organized as "Religious Studies." The associations which accompany the very phrase "psychology of religion" probably include "reductionism," the whole question of "scientific" vs. "humanistic" approaches to the study of man, and a genuine suspicion of the role psychologists have played in "adapting" man to technological society. Obviously, there are psychological thinkers who have themselves raised these same criticisms, or attempted to overcome what they believed to be limitations and biases in current psychological theory. There have also been students of religion who have been open to psychological approaches and theoretical categories, incorporating these into their understanding of religiousness. In this essay, we choose one such psychological category, the notion of fantasy, in order to highlight a key problem in the psychology of religion, and explore possible solutions. Why fantasy? And what is fantasy? As psychologists understand this concept, fantasy is a type of mental activity, a thought-process which is defined over against "goal-directed" practical thinking. The usual qualities assigned to fantastical thinking are: fanciful, dramatic, fulfilling, pictorial, effortless, and egocentric.' In some psychological writings these characteristics are disputed, but on the whole psychologists agree in describing fantasy as a special type of thinking, dominant in such activities as dreams, daydreams , and some forms of play. Fantasy-processes also appear in Thematic Apperception Test stories and Rorshach responses, two sources of data much used by clinicians and researchers. Both Freud and Jung depended on fantasy to provide the "royal road" to the Unconscious, and to an understanding of the true nature and meaning of religion and mythology. The origins of these as products of human culture and human creative imagination lie in fantastical thought. Myths and religious beliefs' are, from the psychological viewpoint, fantasies writ large. However, fantasy is exactly the sort of category which made a generation of religionists squeamish about the psychological approach to religion. Even when writers on religion do wish to employ "fantasy" as a category themselves, they are likely to redefine it away from psychological usage, as we shall see. On the surface, 'Henry A Murray, Techniques for a Systematic Investigation of Fantasy," Journal of Psychology 3 (1937), pp. 115-43 LUCY BREGMAN (Ph D , University of Chicago) is Assistant Professor of Religion at Temple University in Philadelphia. She has published other articles on religion and imaginative processes in Journal of Religion and Review of Religious Research.