Love drives us to seek partners and remain bonded to them and create safe, stable homes in which to raise children.

But love can also drive us  in the opposite direction, towards unhealthy extremes of fantasy and into painful or impossible relationships.

Why?

Fantasy is a basic feature of the human psyche. It’s a mostly wonderful capability that enables so much pleasure and joy. And it has several important functions:

• Fantasy fuels creativity. It drives us to imagine, create, invent and strive.

• Fantasy energizes and empowers. It motivates us to act and try. It gives us strength and gets us going.

• Fantasy emboldens. It makes us brave enough to take risks and suffer some pain if necessary.

Yet fantasy can also spin off into dark places.

• Obsession can rob our attention and energy from other important areas of our lives.
• Delusion can take us out of touch with reality in extreme and harmful ways.
• Idealization (putting the loved one “on a pedestal”)  can make us misunderstand our beloved’s real needs and nature and can cause us to hurt that very person we love so much.

Yeats wrote:

We fed the heart on fantasy
The heart grew brutal from the fare

Sometimes poets and other artists are the most astute psychologists of all!

What do you think?

Photo taken at Lis Sur Mer

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    Last reviewed: 4 Feb 2010