Dictionary

restitutive fantasy en · NOUN

Meanings

1. (countable, uncountable) An imaginary reality created by someone to avoid what they cannot handle emotionally.
   • 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. 2013, Susan Miller, Shame in Context, page 116:
   • 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 […] 1985, Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, page 256:
   • 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. 1963, Jesse E. Gordon, Personality and behavior, page 158:
   • 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. 2007, Leon Wurmser, Torment Me, But Don't Abandon Me:

Forms