Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 73

Escape into fantasies and daydreaming is a basic premise of classic psychoanalytic theory. They stem from unsatisfied wishes and their fabric is wish fulfillment and correction of reality (Freud, 1908/1959a). Life in fantasy is expected to be the infant’s and child’s way of being when alone and to serve important developmental functions. More specifically, a very frequent fantasy for toddlers and preschool‐aged children is the imaginary companion. This companion is an invisible person or animal created by the child who talks and plays with it for a considerable period of time, as if this companion were real. It can also be a real personified object (e.g., a doll). Among the various psychoanalytic interpretations of the developmental functions of this creation is the one that stresses its importance in the child’s struggle against loneliness (Bender & Vogel, 1941; Benson & Pryor, 1973; Nagera, 1969). Neglect and rejection of the child, shift of the mother’s attention to something else, as, for example, happens when a sibling is born, and lack of real playmates before the child starts school, are some common sources of loneliness and motives for the creation of an imaginary companion. A deficit in the child’s life, a more or less serious narcissistic trauma, is compensated by this fantasy. Following is the narrative of a ten‐year‐old boy, an only child, who had experienced the death of a sibling, abandonment by his father, and neglect by his mother (Bender & Vogel, 1941):

I was playing and one day it seemed I had a brother and a sister – John and Mary. They come when I am very lonely, not when I am playing with the boys. They are very much like me. My brother is 9 and my sister is 10. They are very pretty. They play with me and only talk about games and where I was. They would ask why I have been bad all the time. They say if I will be bad all the time and never good they won’t come again. They are a great comfort to me when I am all alone. (p. 59)

The imaginary companion is usually endowed with good qualities: he/she is kind, smart, strong, loveable, neat, obedient, and thus accepted by parents (Nagera, 1969). Through this creation, the child feels accepted and loved by parents during a period when infantile omnipotence subsides, the gradual loss of idealized parental images takes place, and mourning reactions appear. The imaginary companion can be viewed as a narcissistic guardian (Bach, 1971; Benson & Pryor, 1973), as a transitional self (Klein, 1985) for all children, independently of the course of their development, and as a means of alleviating common loneliness and benefiting from inevitable solitude.

In addition to the imaginary companion, three types of conscious fantasies and daydreams have been explicitly associated with loneliness and solitude: family romance, animal fantasies and the fantasy of having a twin. All of them are regarded as common themes of the pre‐latency and latency period (i.e., early, middle, and late childhood) and as arising from the child’s disappointment during the oedipal phase.

More specifically, family romance (Freud, 1909/1959b) is the child’s conscious belief that he/she is an adopted child or a stepchild, and that his/her real parents are nobler, stronger, and lovelier than those with whom he/she lives. It was Dorothy Burlingham (1945) who regarded family romance as motivated also by the wish to overcome loneliness emerging from the child’s disillusionment with parents and from his/her unconscious death wishes for them.

Animal fantasies usually reflect a denial of painful reality, as Anna Freud (1937) argued. The child creates an intimate connection with an imaginary animal companion, with the aim again to feel less lonely. The companions do not need words to understand each other. These animals provide the child with unconditional love, faith, and devotion (Burlingham, 1945).

In the fantasy of having a twin, the imaginary twin substitutes the lost love object, that is, parents, and “is meant to fulfill many of the daydreamer’s longings, above all to keep him from solitude and loneliness” (Burlingham, 1945, p. 208). A narcissistic trauma is at the root of this fantasy. By creating the twin, the child feels invincible, twice as big, strong, and smart, so that the sense of omnipotence is partly restored. Narcissism is hidden behind object love, loneliness is alleviated, and the capacity for beneficial aloneness through a rich fantasy life is enhanced.