The goal of this review is to consider how culture impacts the socialization of emotion development in infancy, and infants’ and young children’s subsequent outcomes. First, we argue that parents’ socialization decisions are embedded within cultural structures, beliefs, and practices. Second, we identify five broad cultural frames (collectivism/individualism; power distance; children’s place in family and culture; ways children learn; and value of emotional experience and expression) that help to organize current and future research. For each frame, we discuss the impact (...) on parents’ socialization practices and infants’ subsequent outcomes relating to emotion-related experience, expression, and understanding. We also generate testable hypotheses to further our understanding of the relationships between the five frames and emotion development in infancy. (shrink)

Embodied Fantasies: From Awe to Artifice is a compilation of twenty-one essays on the subject of fantasy as it relates to art history, philosophy and the visual arts.

This text suggests that imagination is a powerful tool that can be used creatively or destructively, and argues that by becoming more conscious of how we use fantasy and are affected by it, we can learn to apply imagination more constructively.

An unauthorized look behind one of the greatest video game franchises of all time, Final Fantasy The Final Fantasy universe is packed with compelling characters and incredible storylines. In this book, you'll take a fascinating look at the deeper issues that Final Fantasy forces players to think about while trying to battle their way to the next level, such as: Does Cloud really exist? Is Kefka really insane? Are Moogles part of a socialist conspiracy? Does the end (...) of the game justify the means? As Mages, Moogles, fiends, and Kefka are mashed together with the likes of Machiavelli, Marx, Foucault, and Kafka, you'll delve into crucial topics such as madness, nihilism, environmental ethics, Shintoism, the purpose of life, and much more. Examines the philosophical issues behind one of the world's oldest and most popular video-game series Offers new perspectives on Final Fantasy characters and themes Gives you a psychological advantage--or at least a philosophical one--against your Final Fantasy enemies Allows you to apply the wisdom of centuries of philosophy to any game in the series, including Final Fantasy XIII Guaranteed to add a new dimension to your understanding of the Final Fantasy universe, this book is the ultimate companion to the ultimate video-game series. (shrink)

The nature of fantasy has been little discussed, despite its importance in the arts. Its significance is brought out here in relation to the long‐standing debate on the alleged paradox of fiction—that we respond emotionally to characters and events known to be unreal. Examination of the paradox shows it to be ill founded once the nature of fantasy is appreciated. Moreover, a detailed consideration of fantasy shows that it can itself provide a plausible account of our emotional (...) reactions to creative literature, an account that, after a review of some possible objections, is then contrasted with the leading contemporary theories. (shrink)

Successfully integrating history, political psychology, and psychoanalysis, Fantasy and Reality in History studies individual and social anxiety, crisis management, racism and nationalism. By blending clinical and historico-political methods, Loewenberg examines the psycho-sexual conflicts of several charismatic political leaders, including, among others, Gladstone, and Zhirinovsky, Russia's contemporary fascist.

Many people have sexual fantasies about being forced to have sex, or forcing someone to have sex. Several authors have argued that it is wrong to enjoy such fantasies: They lead to harm, or reinforce oppressive social structures, are liable to corrupt our character, or, mostly interestingly, are wrong in themselves, because they involve the eroticization of things that are wrong. I argue here that all such arguments fail properly to distinguish between fantasy and desire (despite authors' acknowledgement of (...) that distinction), and between objects of desire and sources of arousal. The broader significance of this point is also discussed. -/- This paper is intended, in part, as a defense of claims about sexual fantasy made at the end of "Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?". (shrink)

A recent surge of work on prediction-driven processing models--based on Bayesian inference and representation-heavy models--suggests that the material basis of conscious experience is inferentially secluded and neurocentrically brain bound. This paper develops an alternative account based on the free energy principle. It is argued that the free energy principle provides the right basic tools for understanding the anticipatory dynamics of the brain within a larger brain-body-environment dynamic, viewing the material basis of some conscious experiences as extensive--relational and thoroughly world-involving.

Fantasies of Flight invigorates the field of personality psychology by challenging the contemporary academic view that individuals are best studied as carriers of traits. Daniel Ogilvie exchanges a heart-to-heart, case study approach to understanding human behavior for the current strategies of categorizing and comparing individuals according to their manifest traits. Ogilvie asks and endeavors to answer questions like "What were the psychological conditions that led Sir James Barrie to create a character named Peter Pan?" and "What were the dynamics behind (...) the Marshall Herff Applewhite's conviction that a space ship, hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet, would rescue him and his Heaven's Gate followers after they enacted a mass suicide pact in 1997?" Answering these questions requires him to resurrect "old" ways to think about personality and "old" strategies for studying individuals one by one. Early in the book, Ogilvie reviews the history of why intensive case studies were discredited in psychology and describes how Sigmund Freud's psychobiographical account of Leonardo da Vinci's fascination with flight inadvertently abetted critics of psychoanalytic psychology. He then performs a partial psychobiography of James Barrie and the origins of Peter Pan, followed by an investigation of Carl Jung, who fashioned the collective unconscious to serve as humankind's link to eternity. Arguing that personality psychology needs to become less insular, Ogilvie integrates information from the disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience into a theory regarding the latent needs that both Barrie and Jung sought to satisfy. The theory, including its emphasis on the onset of self and consciousness, is then applied to an array of well-known and obscure individuals with ascensionistic inclinations. Well written and accessible, but complex and scholarly, this volume will restore interest in the investigation of people's inner lives. (shrink)

This series celebrates the Bodleian Library's acquisition of Tom Phillips's archive of over 50,000 photographic postcards dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, 'ordinary' people could afford to own their portraits. Each title in this series is thematically assembled and designed by the artist, the covers featuring a linked painting specially created for each title from Tom Phillips's signature work, A Humument.Fantasy Travel shows people sitting (...) proudly and playfully in studio mock-ups of aeroplanes, cars, speedboats and hot air balloons. Such modes of transport were beyond the dreams of the average person in the early twentieth century but the photographic studios allowed them to indulge wild flights of fancy and take away the resulting postcards. (shrink)

Is religion necessarily a form of fantasy, a superstitious childishness we should have put aside by now? If so, what takes the place of empty heaven? May idle dreams threaten secular moralities as much as they threaten religion ? If so, are there authentic forms of religion as well as authentic forms of morality which transcend these threats? He takes us on a journey from religion conceived as a 'somewhere over the rainbow, ' to possibilities of living under a (...) sacramental sky. (shrink)

This article offers an alternative reading of the Abbé Sieyès and the modern ‘nation-state’ problématique. I argue that the subject/object that is constituted in the early days of modernity is the incomplete society: an impossible-possibility ideal of congruency of population, authority and space. I suggest reading this ideal of congruency as a fantasy in that it offers a certain ‘fullness to come’, the promise of jouissance that can never be attained and is thus constantly re-envisioned and reinvoked. Drawing on (...) discourse-analytical and psychoanalytical tools I explain the logic of fantasy before analysing Sieyès’ What is the Third Estate?, as I show how he critiques and fragments the old model of the state and how his reading of the nation is fantasmatic, a continuous project towards impossible congruency. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the appeal of the psychoanalytic category of fantasy for critical political theory, by which I mean a theory grounded in a political ontology that offers a rationale for both normative and ideological critique. I draw on the work of William Connolly, Susan Faludi, Jacqueline Rose, and Judith Butler, among others, to consider the explanatory and critical implications of the concept of fantasy for questions of identity, and political identity in particular. I argue that (...) fantasy is a useful device with which to explore and probe the political and ideological aspects of a practice or narrative because it foregrounds the combined significance of the symbolic and affective dimensions of life. Moreover, a psychoanalytic perspective can facilitate a move away from an epistemological or moralizing understanding of fantasy and political identity, shifting the emphasis instead toward a more ontological and ethical understanding. (shrink)

Because actual social experience is often damaging to conceptions of self, individuals in all societies engage in identity work beyond ordinary social interaction. For people in religious groups, identity work may involve the subjective experience of interactions with spirit beings as in altered states of consciousness such as dreams, reverie, or trance. In memories, anticipations, and fantasies, secular Americans, too, may experience gratifying imaginary social interactions when they gain recognition and acclaim from imagined others. Unlike spirit relations these fantasies are (...) not culturally defined as “real.” However, like spirit relations, they may have very real effects on self‐maintenance. (shrink)

I argue that Martha Nussbaum presents us with an invaluable stance toward nonmoral goods—especially those of fantasy—relative to 1) the anti-perfectionist view regarding moral goods taken in Susan Wolf's "Moral Saints" 2) theperfectionist stance taken by Iris Murdoch. I show how Nussbaum critiques Murdoch not by taking issue with her perfectionist agenda, but by suggesting an alternative to Murdoch's regret-less “coolness” in applying this agenda to the ubiquitously tragic situations that humans encounter.

Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity.’ In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant was concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could (...) class='Hi'>fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant’s conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the ‘free lawfulness’ of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as ‘normatively ambiguous.’. (shrink)

Positive thinking is often assumed to foster effort and success. Research has shown, however, that positive thinking in the form of fantasies about achieving an idealised future predicts less (not...

In this paper, I argue that many violent sexual fantasies are not vicious. In the first part of this article, I sketch out the nature of violent sexual fantasies and note that many people regularly have them. I then argue many violent sexual fantasies are not vicious. My argument strategy is to explore what makes an attitude vicious and then to note that the vice-making feature need not be present in such fantasies and is in fact probably not present in (...) many of them. I then explore some of the implications of this finding for the nature of virtue and pornography policy. (shrink)

Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes’s infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fantasy of individual invulnerability. (...) Vulnerability in the state of nature and the com- monwealth’s fantasy of invulnerability are together a counter-fantasy to the fantasies of invulnerability of Hobbes’s time, through heaven or eternal glory. In question is whether Butler, in her reimagining of community, is, like Hobbes, producing a fantasy, but a meta-fantasy that community can be taken as fantasy without derealizing the fantastic or that fantasizes an honesty about its being fantasy. (shrink)

The experiences of 90 individuals who self-identify as “excessive” or “maladaptive” fantasizers are summarized in this report. Our sample consisted of 75 female and 15 male participants, ranging in age from 18 to 63 who responded to online announcements. Participants completed a 14-question emailed survey requesting descriptions of their fantasy habits and causes of potential distress regarding fantasy. Results demonstrated that participants shared a number of remarkably specific behaviors and concerns regarding their engagement in extensive periods of highly-structured, (...) immersive imaginative experiences, including the use of kinesthetic activity which accompanies the fantasies of 79% of participants. Participants reported distress stemming from three factors: difficulty in controlling the need or desire to engage in fantasizing; concern that the quantity of fantasizing interfered with actual relationships and endeavors; and intense shame and exhaustive efforts to keep this behavior hidden from others. It is hoped that this report will encourage interest in this elusive syndrome. (shrink)

There’s a certain pleasure in fantasizing about possessing knowledge, especially possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. Such fantasies are typically a source of innocent entertainment. However, under the right conditions, fantasies of knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. I argue that this phenomenon helps to explain why some people join and eventually adopt the beliefs of epistemic communities who endorse seemingly bizarre, outlandish claims, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy (...) theory groups. It can be difficult to grasp how members of such groups come to believe the theories they endorse. I argue that one route to such beliefs is via deep absorption in fantasies of knowledge, which can lead entire groups to become collectively detached from reality. (shrink)

(2009). Fantasies and Fetishes: The Erotic Imagination and the Problem of Embodiment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Tradition, Art & Sexuality, pp. 66-82.

Behind our computer screens we are all cyborgs: through fantasy we can understand our involvement in virtual worlds.

Extending a strategy previously used by Clancy, Schacter, McNally, and Pitman , we administered a neutral and a trauma-related version of the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm to a sample of women reporting recovered or repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse , women reporting having always remembered their abuse , and women reporting no history of abuse . We found that individuals reporting recovered memories of CSA are more prone than other participants to falsely recalling and recognizing neutral words that were never presented. (...) Moreover, our study is the first to show that this finding even held when trauma-related material was involved. Correlational analyses revealed that fantasy proneness, but not self-reported traumatic experiences and dissociative symptoms were related to false recall and false recognition. (shrink)

(1993). Fantasies on the fringe: Romantic concepts of nationalism in utopias set at the edges of nineteenth-century Europe. History of European Ideas: Vol. 16, No. 4-6, pp. 647-654.

Talk.origins has officially archived Richard Wein's critique of my book No Free Lunch at http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl. I responded on the ISCID website at http://www.iscid.org/papers/Dembski_ObsessivelyCriticized_050902.pdf. Wein has now responded to that response at http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/replynfl.html. This is my response to Wein's latest. My response here is copyright © 2002 and may be reprinted only for personal use.

In his article ‘ Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen ’ , Roger Scruton offers an account of fantasy, arguing that it is directed away from reality in some important sense, and that cinema is its natural representational medium. I address certain problems with Scruton’s basic account, thereby producing a signifi cantly amended version, though one that owes a great debt to his. I explain why, as he says, much fantasy is signifi cantly directed away from reality; and (...) conclude with some brief remarks about.. (shrink)

Abstract:As new digital technologies, consumer demand, and social issues such as COVID-19 render workplaces increasingly data-centric, employers will require culturally and technologically adept workers who can utilize creativity in every stage of the production process. To prepare students for this demand, institutions of higher education must establish flexible programs that provide professional or technical curricula combined with a liberal arts education that fosters students’ abilities to build imaginations beyond conventionally accepted norms. The capacity for creative fantasy intersects with cognitive (...) maturity and higher-order thinking and thus can be measured using models of adult development. Schools should develop knowledge platforms that can first assess a student’s maturity stage and then design a personalized liberal and professional education plan that maximizes their creative abilities. This article therefore engages adult development theory to map possible trajectories toward students’ constructive use of innovative fantasy and to address ways educational institutions can reorient their approaches. (shrink)

This article interprets Michael Kang's independent feature The Motel as a critique of the Asian American fantasy of post- 1965 incorporation into the multicultural US polity. The film discloses that this Asian American Dream is normatively constituted by heteronormative, middle-class, intra-racial kinship. The protagonist Ernest Chin's longing for this kind of normative Asian American family is symptomatic of his identification with the exclusionary norms of the incorporative fantasy. In a moment of disidentification, though, Ernest is able to release (...) his grip on the dream and its reciprocal grip on him. Disidentification, in my usage, is a kind of political action that both disrupts and reworks processes of social formation from within. As a contribution to the critical philosophy of race, my rendition of disidentification draws on recent developments in cultural studies and political theory to address the critical theoretical question of the psychic life of domination. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek proposed an ethic of respect for the fantasy space of another. Under "fantasy" Jacques Lacan borrowed from Claude Lévi-Strauss the notion of a "private myth." But this fantasy is, Žižek says, illusionary, fragile, and helpless. Fantasy is the way everyone, each in a particular way, conceals the impasse of his desire. Psychoanalytic practice can be criticized as a radical destitution of the fundamental fantasy of the patient. The author argues that what Žižek analyzes (...) as fantasy is a misfire of vision, and could only be recognized in a subject where visions are possible. But visions-the visions of visionaries and seers, and the visions of youth-have to be envisioned dynamically in their activity of formulating, shaping, and intensifying one's insights and one's feelings. Žižek assumes that the forces mobilized by drive, which takes hold of an organ and compulsively makes it repeat the same failed gesture, aim at the excessive and monstrous paroxysm of pleasure in pain, which is jouissance. The author argues that that jouissance can never appear as something possible in the organism, not because it would be a death drive for a finite and temporal organism, but because it is a by-product and not a goal. (shrink)

Although World of Warcraft utilizes ethnic and gender stereotypes in the construction of its playable characters, the structure of the gaming environment provides a modest utopian vision that is structurally just, maximizing both liberty and equality among participants in a way consistent with John Rawls's Theory of Justice. As a result, class, race, and gender are much more a matter of human (humanoid) variety, rather than a tool for hierarchically differentiation. Nevertheless, in players' engagement with the game, class, race, and (...) gender differences take on meaning well beyond the strucuture of the Warcraft universe demonstrating how real world values infect our imagination. (shrink)

These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books; but rather than trying to rate each one, or (what would be more to the point) explain my ratings, I've merely listed them without any particular indication of rank. Horror novels are included here for want of anyplace better to put them. Titles are added as they occur to me.

Good people often die badly, and, sometimes, bad people die well. Both are true for complex reasons. We worry that the tropic formulation trades on a simplistic anthropology that belies the complexities of how persons operate in the world. In this essay, we are interested in these complexities and a better theological acknowledgement of them, not least because the fantasy of the good death ill prepares one for real death. We argue that valorizing pious religious death and profane ugly (...) death loses sight of these complexities, which we think should comprise any account Christians give about what persons are and are in their dying—an account that often goes by the name “theological anthropology.” It is the simplistic theological anthropology more than the tropic formulation—the anthropology the trope smuggles in—that concerns us. Our argument proceeds by first examining the fantasy of the good death, measuring it against a historical record with an examination of the Ars Moriendi tradition, and then thinking more broadly about what motivates it. Along the way, we consider a recent film, The Farewell, where good-death fantasies comically run up against death’s reality and where goodness, truth, and beauty show up anyhow. (shrink)

A week ago, I heard James Conant give a talk at Tufts, entitled “Two Varieties of Skepticism” in which he distinguished two oft-confounded questions.

Fantasies have the power in the very midst of political communities, consciously and unconsciously alike, to suppress internal antagonisms in times of crises. More specifically, they help to blur aporias of a community’s ideological structures by invoking a common sense that reconstitutes the community, similar to an act of religious conversion. Their impact on the “space of reasons” is analyzed in this article because fantasies, and specifically excessive and radical fantasies, suspend the game of giving and asking for reasons. They (...) do so in order to ground premises of contestation in the background of communal reason via an emotional and secret “code” of what it means to be a “we.” Totalitarian, monarchical, and democratic societies need this “code” to purge society of the pure formalities of political reason, or, in other words: to get rid of fantasy fatigue. (shrink)

Anna Vaninskaya's Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien brings together three major writers of fantasy and studies their treatment of temporality and mortality. This book is about our ongoing conversation regarding time and death and the unique ability for fantasy to tackle these biggest of subjects. If writers have long envisioned time as a river and death as the sea, for instance, what Vaninskaya's new book discusses is how fantasy allows us, through the use of (...) impossible creations and new metaphors, to imagine new ways of understanding our ontological trap. The genre attempts to try to see the world as one of the gods creating it, or to understand time as the eternal burden of the elves; we may... (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article focuses on the 1954 short story “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.,” which predicted that frozen meals and microwave cooking would ensure global cooperation and reduce domestic labor, “emancipating” women and inspiring new technologies. This frozen fantasy both reflects the structure of earlier utopian motifs and challenges their essential arguments, particularly when examined alongside Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward and medieval Cockaigne stories of abundant food and feasting. “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” also describes the culinary transformations in the (...) United States in subsequent decades, making it a remarkably prescient utopian text, and its vision of the future was largely (though not completely) realized by the end of the twentieth century. Because frozen meals and kitchen conveniences have proliferated since its publication, “Frozen Foods 2000 A.D.” no longer seems utopian. Instead, American kitchens, and eaters, now view Williams’s futuristic vision as commonplace and expected. (shrink)