a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

in the establishment of "preserves" and "conservation projects" in those
places where the demands of husbandry, traffic and industry threaten quickly
to change the original face of the earth into something unrecognizable. The
national reserves maintain this old condition of things, which otherwise has
everywhere been regretfully sacrificed to necessity. Everything may grow and
spread there as it will, even that which is useless and harmful. The psychic
realm of phantasy is such a reservation withdrawn from the principles of
reality.
The best known productions of phantasy are the so-called "day dreams,"
which we already know, pictured satisfactions of ambitious, of covetous and
erotic wishes, which flourish the more grandly the more reality admonishes
them to modesty and patience. There is unmistakably shown in them the
nature of imaginative happiness, the restoration of the independence of
pleasurable gratification from the acquiescence of reality. We know such day
dreams are nuclei and models for the dreams of night. The night dream is
essentially nothing but a day dream, distorted by the nocturnal forms of
psychological activity, and made available by the freedom which the night
gives to instinctive impulses. We have already become acquainted with the
idea that a day dream is not necessarily conscious, that there are also
unconscious day dreams. Such unconscious day dreams are as much the
source of night dreams as of neurotic symptoms.
The significance of phantasy for the development of symptoms will become
clear to you by the following: We have said that in a case of renunciation, the
libido occupies regressively the positions once abandoned by it, to which,
nevertheless, it has clung in certain ways. We shall neither retract this
statement nor correct it, but we shall insert a missing link. How does the
libido find its way to these points of fixation? Well, every object and tendency
of the libido that has been abandoned, is not abandoned in every sense of the
word. They, or their derivatives, are still held in presentations of the
phantasy, with a certain degree of intensity. The libido need only retire to the
imagination in order to find from them the open road to all suppressed
fixations. These phantasies were happy under a sort of tolerance, there was
no conflict between them and the ego, no matter how acute the contrast, so
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