§ Note. This is incomplete. I wrote it one day in December of 2001 and never got back to it. The title has nothing to do with Jacques Lacan — see my postscript at the end of the article, written in 2002. I have also now (in 2003) included relevant selections from a book review posted on the original site in 2001. See the addendum following the postscript.

Fantasy, as I have said before, is the pairing of imagination with desire.

The fundamental fact about fantasy is that it need not bear any relation to what is likely or possible in the physical world. By imagining an individual's psychology to be different than what it actually is we may fantasize that someone will behave in a way which that person would never behave or would behave only under very particular circumstances which may never occur. This someone may be our own self.

Portions of our fantasies are built of pure imagined action, other portions are present within us only as language and imagined speech; but in every case that action or speech instills within us, within the fantasy, the satisfaction of some desire. There is, then, the desire that is being satisfied within the fantasy by the behavior within it, and there is the desire for the actualization of the fantasy in order to experience the desire satisfied within the fantasy. An attempt to satisfy the desire for the actualization may not result in the satisfaction of the desire around which the fantasy is built.

It seems likely that the failure of satisfaction occurs because someone participating in the actualization is unlike what we imagined within the fantasy. Again, this someone may be our own self. How does this occur that we can misread our selves? "Fantasies are simple, people are complex." This is a ready answer, but does it give us insight into the conundrum? "We script our fantasies, but real people don't always follow the script." This sounds similar but it seems to tell us more. We cannot follow a script if someone else is expressing their own quite different script. Only if your script is to follow someone else's script can you follow both at once. How likely is this?

It seems that D/s fantasies would lend themselves pretty well to actualization, as long as the submissive's desire is to satisfy the desire of the Dominant, and the Dominant, in turn, expresses his desire within the boundaries of what the submissive considers a satisfactory script.

The notion of script is misleading, however. There is no script, exactly, there is only desire and the imagined behavior that within the imagination satisfies that desire. So, again, there can be a misreading of our own character, a misrepresentation of how we would actually behave or the degree to which the desire which is satisfied within the fantasy can be satisfied in that fantasy's actualization.

Why then does the desire arise in relation to the imagined acts and thereby create within us the fantasy? How could it be that our minds would present us with an imaginary situation and join with that imagined event a sense of satisfied desire? What within the imagined event is generating the apparent satisfaction and creating a desire for the fantasy's actualization if it is not the promise of the satisfaction of the desire that seems to be satisfied within the fantasy? What is the actual desire that is being satisfied if it is not a desire that could be as satisfied in the actualization of the fantasy as it is in the fantasy itself?

Is it possible that the desire within the fantasy is itself imaginary? Is an imaginary desire a psychological possibility? Imagining we have a desire is certainly possible, but is the desire within fantasy of this type? If the nature of fantasy is to contain within it an actual desire then no, this is very different from imagining an event and simultaneously imagining that a desire is satisfied through that event. Fantasies seem to contain an actual desire within them as they unfold. It is not simply that we suppose that if we had the actual desire that the actualization of the fantasy would satisfy it. Fantasy is infused with desire. But what, then, is the desire that the fantasy has arisen to satisfy, and which within itself gives a foretaste of satisfaction?

Let's return to the question of how we could be wrong about how the actualization of a fantasy would satisfy the desire we suppose is being satisfied within the fantasy. It seems likely that the desire underlies and psychologically precedes the fantasy, that it in some sense participated in the formation of the imaginary situation in order to create its own satisfaction. When the fantasy itself cannot fully satisfy the desire, when imagining is not enough, the secondary desire arises within us to actualize the fantasy. So how could it be that an actualization could fail to complete the satisfaction? Is it the fault of our imagination? Is the fantasy insufficient, even in the fullest fidelity of its actualization, to satisfy the desire infusing it? If we had a better imagination would this remove the desire for actualization? Would the satisfaction within the fantasy be enough? Would we call these now sufficiently powerful imaginary events 'fantasies' if we had no secondary desire to actualize them?

Maybe we're looking at desire wrong. Maybe we're misreading what the fantasy is designed to satisfy. Could it be that a literal reading of the fantasy is a mistake? Can we in fact read the desire correctly within the fantasy? Don't we usually equate the imagined events with the object of the desire and read the desire from the events within the fantasy? Is it possible this is the wrong way to read desire? Why would desire institute within us a fantasy if that fantasy had no literal connection with the desire itself? What would it mean to say that a fantasy has only a figurative connection to desire? Is fantasy like a code, a misleading transcription of desire? Why hide the satisfaction of a desire in such a way that we cannot discern the desire and act to satisfy it when the fantasy fails to be enough? If we misread fantasy in this way, does it still make sense to try to actualize the fantasy? If a coding and transcription of desire occurs in fantasy why wouldn't desire find the same satisfaction in the fantasy's actualization as it seems to at least begin to acquire in fantasy? If it works in one place why not in the other?

We're back where we started and it seems the problem is simply that we misread our selves in supposing we can carry out our part in the actualization of the fantasy or that we've mischaracterized the other participants of the fantasy. We can't do much about the others, but what about our own self-characterization?

[How does desire arise, and where is pleasure in this?]

Postscript 2002. For the curious, almost all I know (or believe I know) about Jacques Lacan is that he believes (why he believes it, I do not know, and this is a crucial missing element for understanding his position) that our inescapable involvement with language prevents our chances of any complete satisfaction of desire. There is always an unsatisfied remnant of desire {see the next paragraph for further comments}. He believes that something is always lacking in any satisfaction, and that this thing that is lacking is lacking because our involvement with language separates us from what he calls the Real (clearly not what most of us mean when we speak of the real). We are always within the Imaginary, according to Lacan, because language confines us there. The only way you could (deliberately) experience the Real is to have never been tainted by language. This implies that the Real is ineffable, it cannot be referenced by language, even cryptically, and moreover, that Lacan himself can have no referential knowledge of the Real, and therefore that he cannot know what it is that he cannot possibly be talking about.

{Concerning the unsatisfied remnant of desire, for all I know Lacan could mean a remnant of any specific desire seeking satisfaction at the moment, but he probably means something like a remnant of desire in general, i.e. desire as a psychological force, meaning that the remnant isn't specific to a particular desire but rather is that quality of all particular desires derivative of desire itself. Or he means, perhaps (and this is not necessarily the same meaning), some sort of pervasive, ultimate drive or desire which lies behind all desire — for example, combining or occuring in tandem with hunger and any other desire is another desire, always active within the same process, seeking to reach satisfaction. Thus, the something that is lacking is not the satisfaction of the drive or desire per se but rather the satisfaction of this posited ultimate drive or desire that combines with (or lies behind, somewhat like a Platonic Form) every other drive. What this ultimate drive might be, I do not know.}

If you think for a moment about Lacan's supposition that the only way you could experience the Real is to have never been tainted by language, you see that if everything that we experience is according to Lacan somehow imaginary in our meaning of the term, then he's subsumed our meaning of real into his meaning of Imaginary and we still need a word to mark the distinction that even Lacan makes when he tries to convince us that attempts to satisfy desire (to actualize the fantasy that desire has given us) will always in some significant sense fail. Because, of course, desire seeks satisfaction within what we call the real. Lacan just wants to say we never in fact fully leave imagination, so even our real is bound to our imagination. (French theorists tend towards Idealism, which posits that the physical world is a mental construct. Consider, also, Freud and psychosis.) But when I talk in the article about the real, I just mean that physical world where we interact and try to find non-imaginary satisfaction, the place where we try to actualize our fantasies. Recall that I even raised the question of whether a desire could be fully satisfied within the imagination. I am not in any way consciously applying any form or fragment of Lacanian theory when I analyze desire, its role in imagination and its satisfaction in reality.

Not a single line of this should be taken as an accurate description of Lacan's ideas. My point is to show how little I understand Lacan. Any reader who knows more than I do will see my errors. It is those who know nothing who might now imagine they know something that I here caution.

Addendum 2003. Earlier in 2001, within a book review on James Patterson's Kiss the Girls, I discussed the imaginary and the real in the following way.

[. . .] To think of a thing, to speak of a thing, is not to witness or experience it. There is the thing itself, and then there is the representation of that thing. The imagination in art, literature, daydreams, thought and fantasy, the words and images within our minds, spoken or given form upon the page, canvas or screen — none of this is the thing itself. As representations they carry, by their very nature, only a semblance of the real. They are not the act, the blood, the agony and death. If in the exercise of our imagination we find pleasure, it is a pleasure based upon the imaginary, not the real. The imaginary, no matter how vivid or how powerful its attendant affects — joy, sorrow, pleasure, or dread — is nevertheless, by definition and fact, not real. It is not the imagined thing itself, but only the image of that which is imagined.

When the real is experienced without the imaginary, those affects and emotions brought to us through our imagination may not exist. This is because we are within the realm of the real, and its powers differ from those of the imaginary. You can imagine the real, but you cannot experience the real within your imagination. [. . .]

We as readers, read with our imagination, and so the emotions we experience are never likely to be fully like any that would be experienced by anyone within the story, if the story were true. And in fact, by the very nature of imagination, it will more likely be that our emotional experiences, as they flow within our imagination, will flow along the lines of the emotions that the characters (if they were real) would experience when they too are experiencing the imaginary. In other words, when characters are not simply engulfed by the real (let's leave aside the details of when that might be — although it's very important philosophically) they will be shunted within the imaginary to some degree or another. And this is where we have some chance of feeling the same thing they would feel (in the imaginary world of the novel).

This all means that we're more likely to not read the story anything like it would be experienced by real people living the experiences described. This goes for all fiction, as for anything which is merely a representation of the real (as already discussed). And furthermore, that it's possible to find pleasure in represented acts that when experienced or witnessed within the real would bring no pleasure at all. [. . .]

[. . .] My distinction is between imagining something and experiencing it. Because imagination often overlays experience, the distinction is not exclusionary, and hence the question occurs of when, if ever, the real might be experienced. [. . .]