Fantasying versus Dreaming

DW Winnicott's paper, Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living  is collected in his seminal book Playing and Reality. I have zero confidence that I understand any of it. Nevertheless it seems to illuminate something in my own experience. Perhaps Winnicott was describing something entirely different, and yet somehow his words, which I have read closely, slowly, and with difficulty, ignite recognition. So I will just assume that he was talking about me as much as he was talking about his patient. 

I have a very simple example of fantasying. For 3 months DH has been telling me, gently and convincingly, that I should do pull downs and bench presses at least once a week, preferably twice. I wholeheartedly agree that it is the right thing to do and have thought about doing them several times a week. Vivid images of me doing pull downs and bench presses float around in my head. Nevertheless, I have actually done them no more than 5 times in 3 months. I can't even remember the actual number of times, because all the imagined workouts have blended into the memory of real action. This is fantasying. 

This is a real but low-stake example, but who doesn't know someone who has put their life on hold indefinitely because they are waiting for something to happen? They will get their act together and begin their life, for real, as soon as they meet their soulmate, or find their true passion, or land their dream job, or figure out what they really want. Before the monumental event happens, however, they can always fill the void with constant visualization of their dream life. 

Winnicott pointed out that fantasying not only does not nourish one's emotion life but stifles it. He did not describe, theorize, or explain how it does so. Perhaps it is not the point anyway. 

Ironically, popular self-help theories have made billions of dollars by promoting fantasying, ie, by encouraging people to imagine, in vivid details, their wish-fulfillment. It is usually packaged as the American Dream or The Secret. In fact, the word "dream" in today's culture means daydreaming much more often than night-dreaming. 

According to Winnicott, only night-dreaming is real dreaming and truly nourishes one's emotional health. Real dreams are full of symbols, which lead people into their deepest truths, including what they want. Subsequently, this path lead away from idle fantasying and true living. 

No Other Choice (2025) - Not a review

When I entered the workforce in 1999, Microsoft Word had already dominated the word-processing market and pushed Word Perfect into oblivion. At the time, I heard many colleagues in writing/publishing lament how much better Word Perfect is than Word and wondered how a superior product could not win the game of competition in the supposed free market. Nearly three decades later, a few days ago I heard the same sentiment from someone in the business of pharmaceutical regulatory publishing. Even now someone still remembers the superiority of the long-dead Word Perfect. It reminded me of Park Chan-wook's new movie, No Other Choice, because the answer is that this is a free market in which the surviving product or company wins not by being better but by murdering its competition.

Not having read Das Kapital, I have no idea whether any economists in history predicted the elegant ways of monopoly: First you kill all your competitors through bottom-barrel, negative-balance-sheet pricing. Once they are all dead, you raise the prices on consumers, who now have "no other choice" but buy from you. And the initial self-sabotaging strategy is funded by Wall Street and private equities, who can afford to wait until they reap obscene amounts of profit from captive consumers. Superior products are necessarily more expensive and therefore always lose out in this scheme. Whose fault is it? We consumers have no one to blame but ourselves, because the vast majority of people cannot help ourselves but to always reach toward the lowest price stickers like moths fly toward the flame. 

The idea of shirking responsibilities has been circling in the back of my mind since, at least consciously, I watched "The Sopranos," which was made in my formative years when I did not quite understand the culture around me --- a culture of absolutely no responsibilities. The title "No Other Choice" is in large part about the same theme, an ironic phrase behind which everyone hides while committing murder. Once again my mind is drawn back to the bright sunny morning in March 2003, when my friend and I sat outside of MCI Center and heard about the new of the invasion of Iraq. Nowadays every American involved in making that war happen would say they had no other choice, including those men and women who joined the military explicitly to take revenge on "those people over there" and, 20 years later, whine about wasting their time and youth in the military and Biden's decision to pull the last troops out of Afghanistan. Of course, nobody had any choice, it's all just a big weather system that came and killed millions of people and destroyed American wealth (but not the wealthy) for generations.

Before I watched the movie but after reading its synopsis, I thought it was going to be another sob story about how cruel and dehumanizing corporations are, how capitalistic greed sucks the soul out of hardworking average workers, blah blah blah. I thought it would be another "elegy" in line with Case and Deaton's Death of Despair theory, trailing behind droves of intellectuals who have cashed in on the plight of the virtuous American workers who lost their jobs to evil Chinese and Mexican workers. I was surprised, however, that the central character, Man-su, despairs in losing his middle-class social status, his elaborate hilltop house, two dogs fed on gourmet food, and a stay-at-home wife. His extreme measures to land the next job are not driven by poverty or starvation, but rather by the absolute refusal to change ... himself. The movie makes no demand for my sympathy. What a relief. Thank you.

Isn't it great? We're all leaves tossed in the wind, victims of evil whoevers, never having to take any responsibilities for any of our own decisions. Some years later, when aliens land on earth and wonder how the planet became uninhabitable, the electronic documentation of our images and chatters will explain to them that we annihilated our own home because we had "no other choice." After all, we can't do without cars because we already built the highways, we can't give up beef because it is the only food men should eat, we can't stop building data centers because it is our patriotic duty.

The ending of "No Other Choice" is beautiful. After chuckling ironically for 2 hours, I did not expect to be hit with such poignancy that tears came to my eyes.