“The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.”

— C.G. Jung , book Psychological Types

Source: Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921), Ch. 1, p. 82

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C.G. Jung 257

Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytic… 1875–1961

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“Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.”

C.G. Jung book Psychological Types

Source: Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921), Ch. 1, p. 82
Context: The dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic also of the child, and as such it appears inconsistent with the principle of serious work. But without this playing with fantasy no creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable. It is therefore short-sighted to treat fantasy, on account of its risky or unacceptable nature, as a thing of little worth.

“The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.”

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian neurologist known as the founding father of psychoanalysis

“Creative work is serious play.”

Robert Fripp (1946) English guitarist, composer and record producer

Guitar Craft Monograph III: Aphorisms, Oct. 27 1988

“The roles that Eastwood has played, and the films that he has directed, cannot be disentangled from the nature of the American culture of the last quarter century, its fantasies and its realities.”

Clint Eastwood (1930) actor and director from the United States

Author Edward Gallafent, commenting on Eastwood's impact on film from the 1970s to 1990s
Gallafent, Edward (1994). Clint Eastwood. p. 10. New York: Continuum. ISBN 0826406653.

“In this way things, external objects, are assimilated to more or less ordered motor schemas, and in this continuous assimilation of objects the child's own activity is the starting point of play. Not only this, but when to pure movement are added language and imagination, the assimilation is strengthened, and wherever the mind feels no actual need for accommodating itself to reality, its natural tendency will be to distort the objects that surround it in accordance with its desires or its fantasy, in short to use them for its satisfaction. Such is the intellectual egocentrism that characterizes the earliest form of child thought.”

Jean Piaget (1896–1980) Swiss psychologist, biologist, logician, philosopher & academic

Source: The Moral Judgment of the Child (1932), Ch. 2 : Adult Constraint and Moral Realism

“The interpretation of constitutional principles must not be too literal. We must remember that the machinery of government would not work if it were not allowed a little play in its joints.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Writing for the Court, Bain Peanut Co. v. Pinson, 282 U.S. 499, 501 (1931).
1930s

“When a child… discovers his own imagination, he suddenly walks into a new life. …seeing situations that do not exist. …in part as fantasy, and in part as a quite rational exploration of future experiences. …play …frolics in the fantasy world, and it experiments in the rational world… They project themselves into all worlds, possible and impossible, and discover for themselves the knife-edge boundary between them.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Imaginative Mind in Art" (1978)

“You always start with a fantasy. Part of the fantasy technique is to visualize something as perfect. Then with the experiments you work back from the fantasy to reality, hacking away at the components.”

Edwin H. Land (1909–1991) American scientist and inventor

As quoted in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 146, no. 1, (March 2002), p. 115

“It's just a fantasy
It's not the real thing
It's just a fantasy
It's not the real thing.
But sometimes a fantasy
Is all you need.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Sometimes a Fantasy.
Song lyrics, Glass Houses (1980)

“When we do fantasy, we must not lose sight of reality.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

As quoted in Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (Disney Editions, 2001) p. 102

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