§ 162
The use of the imagination as a transformer of unconscious energy is a comparatively modern technique and one made use of with great effect in autosuggestion.
As a transformer of unconscious psychic energy, or possibly, better, a re-shaper, it has sharply to be distinguished from phantasy.
Phantasy is the continuous mental activity that goes on night and day in the mind of every man, woman and child. It consists of visual images, auditory images, tactual, kinesthetic, thermal and a dozen other qualities all combining with each other in the patterns by no means fortuitous, but organized into groups, some of which have been called complexes. This organization is the unconscious wish. The patterns formed are unrelated to time, are unmoral and follow exclusively the pleasure-pain principle.
Phantasy, which is entirely spontaneous, or independent of any conscious volition on the part of the individual, is about ninety-nine per cent submerged in the unconscious. The one per cent more or less that emerges into the consciousness of the ordinary man of the world comes in as day-dreaming or as dreams of the night. In these two forms it appears in a shape least disguised, and is therefore the chief material of psychoanalysis, which is an inventory of the contents of the unconscious of the individual, an inventory that shows what possibilities he has of future better adaptation to his environment. It also shows why the people who are ill-adapted have failed to adapt themselves.
We are obliged to assume a causal connection between the phantasies of unconscious mind and the physiological process in the body on the one hand and on the other the broader life currents of the individual.