Fantasy: Definition and relations/genre
- Definition
- Most often referred to as a term in psychology as a "mental apprehension of an object of perception."
- The fact or habit of deluding oneself by imaginary perceptions.
- A daydream arising from conscious or unconscious wishes or attitudes.
- Desire and fantasy seem to be closely related.
- Imagination with genius and fantasy with taste.
- Fantasy is it's own genre in film, television, theater and literature.
- Fantasy in cinema and theater must be viewed in conjunction with surrealism.
Source 2: http://www.answers.com/topic/fantasy-psychology
Forms of Fantasy
- Conscious Fantasy
- A situation imagined by an individual or group that has no basis in reality
- Likely involves the impossible
- Can be considered a trait of Narcissistic Personality Disorder
- Can have beneficial elements
- A similarity positive view of fantasy.
- Ex: The energetic man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality.
- Ex: The artist can transform his phantasies into artistic creations instead of symptoms.
- The unconscious is made up of phantasies of relations with objects.
- Thought as primary and innate and as the mental representations of instincts.
4. Desire
- The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy and on a single theme, minimizing the variations in meaning which might otherwise cause a problem.
Escapism: The Good and the Bad
- The Good
- A term employed by the psychological profession to denote an act of the intentional or unintentional removal of one's psyche from it's current reality.
- By this definition we can remove ourselves from our immediate surroundings to exchange it for something more pleasurable.
- Can give one a new self image.
- Can leave a person thinking that he has everything and knows it, but thinks it says something about him and while it does, it may not be the same way to others.
- Leave someone unaware of oneself.
- More like a vacation and that you have to come back eventually.
Escapism: Its causes and how it's important and/or unimportant
- Causes:
- People want to get away from daily stresses of life.
- Depression or mental anxieties.
- Those who want to focus on happier times.
- Can allow a person to realign themselves and approach reality with a more positive outlook.
- Can open doors and can surpass natural sciences in many ways.
- Some say it's important to the human experience to live in reality and face the consequences.
- Can cause a person to neglect reality and retreat from dealing with depression or similar mental anxiety in a tangible and practical way.
- Why would people want to escape?
- Hardships. War, poverty, stress etc.
- Desire to maintain a certain image.
- Escape pressures and responsibilities.
- Low self-esteem
- Escapism is considered a panacea
- Escaping the self is thus not a matter of removing the self entirely, but rather of shrinking it down to its bare minimum.
- It's more like an escape from identity into body.
- It involves passivity.
- Apart from the body, the rest of the self is something that was made, and to escape the self, you must mentally unmake it.
- Psychological Basics of Human Behavior
- Common sense may be indeed common, or general, but its sense is surrounded by prejudice, superstition, and acres of wishful thinking.
- Studying the individual is in all the facets of a person and determining how these factors explain and predict his behavior.
- To achieve such, one would require the need to formulate an explanation on every occurrence in the past and permit predictions
- Would need to make arrangements, manipulate environment, prepare for known action, and thus control outcome.
- The present treatment of the mental phenomenon.
- The activity of man with which he enters life completely equipped and has given to it the term subconscious: that which lies below or outside of consciousness, but not the opposite of the term conscious.
The Movement of Surrealism
- Aims and Methods
- Might be described as both the common denominator and the most extreme variants of irrational, fantastical phenomena.
- Surrealists were aware of the subject of dreams yet the interpretations of the latter wasn't of essential importance.
- Dreams interested them, along with many abnormal psychic reactions and conditions, because the interest in these things led beyond the "rational" everyday reality.
- Surrealists were sometimes poets.
- In one respect, painting was especially close to semi-conscious or unconscious creative spontaneity.
- It is believed that with a painting manner less tied to its physical model, the unconcious can achieve a breakthrough with for less inhibitions.
Artists started/influenced Surrealism
- Andre Breton
- He was drawing attention to the works of poets, philosophers, psychologists, artists, and others that contained, to a greater or lesser degree, the features which would later be called Surrealists.
- He gave Surrealism its first formal definition in the manifesto of 1924.
- Defined it as a state of the creative mind and/or spirit which had existed in various individual throughout history.
- Influenced the style of illusionistic surrealists by the "poetic theater".
- While it was a crucial influence for many surrealist artist, his references to the inconography of the past were handled in such a way as not to be assimilable.
- Began the series of oil painting in which this synthesis is embodied, and which constituted the sole direct link between Dada and Surrealism, late in 1921.
- His proto-surrealist style is generally realistic, but with the elimination of detail, the low-relief modeling, and with deep and stage like space.
Picasso and Surrealism
- A way of escape
- Frequent escape into the solitude of creativity was as essential as a fresh intake of air, and as bracing.
- Having embarked upon a quest for metamorphic forms, he followed it down a dozen different avenues.
- He shared the Surrealist's conviction that large sources of subject matter waited to be tapped in art.
- The painting style represented far more than a salute to surrealist doctrine; it was the omen of a new style in Picasso's art, unleashing his inventive powers as never before.
- His surrealistic poetry was spontaneous and unselfconscious, unfettered by rules of grammar or form; yet it was full of original imagery.
Artists interpretations of Surrealism
- Max Ernst
- One of Surrealism's first revolutionary act was to bring down its myths with impartial means and in the severest form, by insisting vigorously on the purely passive role of the "author" and by unmasking as adverse to inspiration all "active" control through intellect, morality, or aesthetic considerations.
- Since every normal person carries in his subconscious an inexhaustible supply of buried pictures, it is a matter of courage or of liberating methods to bring to light from expeditions into the unconscious objects.
- It was difficult for him to talk about his painting since it was always born in a state of hallucination provoked by some shock, objective or subjective, for which he was entirely irresponsible.
- He increasingly forced himself to attain a maximum of clarity, power, and plastic aggressiveness, that is, to provoke first of all a physical sensation, and then to arrive at the soul.
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