A Science of Fantasy
A SCIENCE can be said to be rigorous in as much as it excises the desires of the scientist. The scientist, prone to wish-fulfillment, beliefs and biases, delusions of grandeur, day-dreams, nightmares and a general plague of feelings, deploys the method of science as a means to empirically observe a reality that is uncontaminated by all that psychic noise. Such is the dream of science. Psychoanalysis, far from being opposed to this, is the exact inverse of this program; it is the other side of science. Whereas the laboratory is that space precisely kept clean of fantasy and its projections, the consulting room of psychoanalysis—the frame—is meant to isolate the patient’s paranoia in order to study it; the frame functions as a petri dish of subjective fantasy in all of its many forms. The goal is by no means to confirm, or collude with, the patient’s fantasy (as A.I. does) but to draw it out into the open so that it may eventually be recognized as fantasy. Thus psychoanalysis is a Science of Fantasy.
Smaug, 2016, Justin Gerard
