THE 8 RULES OF FANTASY ANALYSIS:
- Record all metaphors and similes, regardless of
context.
- Record all body language, strong feeling tones,
and strong emotional states.
- Record all repetitive, unusual or gratuitous word
usages.
- Record any obviously symbolic terms.
- Eliminate all negatives.
- Eliminate all subjects and objects.
- Record all overt group responses.
- Note any long periods of no imagery.
Original complete text from:
"Foundations of Psychohistory" pg. 194 - 195
is also included below:
Part of the concept of historical group-fantasy is the
assumption that the bulk of the public discourse which
psychohistorians regularly examine is defensive in nature,
designed to beguile the conscious mind into accepting the
rationalizations which hide the underlying fantasy message being
shared by the members of the group. Although this purely
defensive content is interesting in its own right and cannot be
ignored, the underlying group-fantasy itself is more easily seen
if only the more powerful emotional words are selected and set
down next to each other, where connections and themes can emerge
which otherwise remain buried under the sheer mass of defensive
material.
One technique I have found useful over the past few years is
to go through the historical document, be it a newspaper article,
a Presidential speech or a Congressional committee transcript,
and pick out only the metaphors, similies, body terms, strong
feeling words, repetitive phrases and symbolic terms, and then
examine them for thematic content. This technique, which I term
Fantasy Analysis, becomes rather easy to do when one realizes
that one must first read the original material for overt content,
in order to satisfy one's conscious desire to find out what the
person is intentionally saying about "real" events.
Then, in a different mind set entirely, the same document must be
reread for fantasy content alone. This fantasy content is rarely
much more than one percent of the content of the document and can
be elicited by following these eight rules:
- Record all metaphors and similes, regardless of
context. This is not as easy as it may sound - the
history of etymology shows all phrases beginning in a
metaphoric haze and only becoming specific with long use.
It is better to include borderline cases than leave them
out - for instance, "arms cuts" begins to have
fantasy overtones (in a disarmament conference) once
connected with other fantasy words which comes to convey
the literal meaning of cuts in the (human) arm.
- Record all body language, strong feeling tones, and
strong emotional states. Obviously the words
"kill," "death," "love,"
"hate," and so on convey important emotional
messages - but what is fascinating is how often they
occur in contexts that simultaneously deny their
importance and defend against their "really"
having an emotional meaning. Often a meeting which is
deciding on going to war spends much of its time
discussing procedural matters in a very dull, emotionless
language, but just as everyone is about to fall asleep,
slips in terms like "killing the outstanding
bill" or "progress on the bill has come to a
dead halt," and the psychohistorian must be alert
enough to pick up just the words "killing" and
"dead".
- Record all repetitive, unusual or gratuitous word
usages. This requires total concentration,
especially when a long document is being examined, since
the repetitions are often pages apart and the
"unusualness" of a word or phrase depends upon
context. But if, for instance, a Russian revolutionary
document uses coming out" several times (to mean
revolution), this should be picked up as an important
unusual phrase conveying a particularly potent emotional
message.
- Record any obviously symbolic terms, especially
political terms, like flags and such, but also including
familial imagery or any other overtly symbolic phrases.
- Eliminate all negatives. A speaker coming before
you and saying "I do not want to speak today about
war, revolution, death, fear and destruction" is, of
course, conveying the positive message he denies. All
negatives and all denials are part of the defensive, not
the fantasy, structure; as Freud said long ago, the
unconscious does not know the negative.
- Eliminate all subjects and objects. The basic
defensive technique involves projection of subject and/or
object, so one can-not depend on the language of the
speaker to indicate the real subject/object of the
fantasy. So when the document says "The Russians are
cracking", only the word "cracking" is
copied down; whether it is the Russians that are truly
cracking or whether it is the speaker (and his group) who
feel they are cracking should be left to other evidence.
- Record all overt group responses, laughter,
moments of relaxation in meetings, breaks, asides, tense
silences, and so on, wherever possible.
- Note any long periods of no imagery. If, in a
meeting, you cannot find a single image for pages and
pages of dialogue, make a note of this in brackets in
your analysis - it indicates that there is a lack of
group development and that group-fantasy is being
severely repressed for some reason.
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