A Science of Fantasy
A SCIENCE is rigorous in as much as it is not superstitious. That is, half of scientific rigor is just getting rid of the desire of the scientist. The all-too-human 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 drift. The scientist is objective and views the world objectively, without emotions, like Mr. Spock in Star Trek. Such is the impersonal 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 and retain 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, or banish the patient’s fantasy 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
