restitutive fantasy

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English[edit]

Noun[edit]

restitutive fantasy (countable and uncountable, plural restitutive fantasies)

  1. (psychology) An imaginary reality created by someone to avoid what they cannot handle emotionally.
    • 1963, Jesse E. Gordon, Personality and behavior, page 158:
      In restitutive fantasy, the person imagines some goal object which is not present in the environment: the fantasy thus serves as a replacement for the absent real object. The lonely child imagines his parents when they are away from him.
    • 1985, Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, page 256:
      If Keats cannot, in restitutive fantasy, resurrect "the teeming autumn, big with rich increase," his imagination will, in a second attempt, rise to another response in an effort to deny the obdurate blankness of the stubble-plains []
    • 2007, Leon Wurmser, Torment Me, But Don't Abandon Me:
      The patient's aim is therefore that the analyst replace a missing part; it is not the process of self-exploration. The enactment of such a restitutive fantasy serves the defense against the depressive affect about loss: the defense against mourning.
    • 2013, Susan Miller, Shame in Context, page 116:
      Jeremy's father gave him a leg up into the restitutive fantasy of specialness by providing the adoption story of the “chosen” and “special” child.