restitutive fantasy

plural restitutive fantasies

1. countableuncountablehuman sciencesAn 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

   3 more examples

   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

   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

   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