Samizdat

“Clearly the issue remains insoluble as long as we insist that behavior and fantasy are two different realms. This schism produces all the others: between secular and sacred, between “in here” and “out there,” between mythology and pathology. Therefore the first step toward resolving the particular problem of rape is to recognize the larger mistake behind it. This mistake can be rectified by remembering that behavior is also fantasy and fantasy is also behavior, and always.

This means, first, that fantasy is also physical; it is a mode of being in the world. We cannot be in the physical world without at the same time and all the time demonstrating an archetypal structure. We cannot move or feel without enacting a fantasy. Our fantasies are not only in the mind; we are behaving them.

Second, the union of fantasy and behavior means that there is no pure, no objective behavior as such. Behavior may never be taken on its own level, literally. It is always guided by imaginal processes and expresses them. Behavior is always metaphorical and requires a hermeneutic approach as much as does the most fantastic reverie of mystical vision.”

–W.H. Roscher, Pan and the Nightmare: Ephialtes–A Pathological-Mythological Treatise on the Nightmare in Classical Antiquity, & An Essay on Pan by James Hillman, 1972. Pp. xxxix. (James Hillman, “An Essay on Pan.”)