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.
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Only by assuming this causal connection, which must also be a two-way connection, can we explain any influence of mind upon body. From innumerable instances, however, we are all absolutely sure that the mind influences the bodily functions and that the bodily functions influence the mind.
In no sphere of human activity is the influence of the mind on the body more clearly demonstrable than in the erotic sphere, both in its equatorial physical zones and in its polar intellectual zones.
This makes it absolutely incontrovertible not only that man can control his emotions, including the erotic; but that he should, if he wishes to be human and not merely animal.
In the causal connection between hypersomatic (mind) and hyposomatic (body) there is at least one link called the imagination. But the fact that imagination is so broad a term makes the understanding difficult as to how the various mental mechanisms, mostly unconscious, interact with each other.