Fantasy and mourning: heterogeneity, alterity, and discontinuity in the pastoral encounter

In exploring why the topic of fantasy has been absent from current pastoral care articles, the author draws from the work of Peter Homans and Eric Santner to inscribe the social dimensions of fantasy in the pastoral encounter, arguing that fantasy closes us off from radical change, difference, strangeness, and loss (discontinuity, heterogeneity, alterity, and mourning) while, paradoxically, opening us up to these excesses of life. Understanding the unconscious interpsychic role of fantasy makes these ever-widening dilemmas more psychologically transparent and even theologically transformational. Without this perspective, what often remains is a disappointing, unreflective, rationalized fiction of a stranger.