restitutive fantasy

restitutive fantasy (countable and uncountable, plural restitutive fantasies)

1. (psychology) An imaginary reality created by someone to avoid what they cannot handle emotionally.
   • 1963, Jesse E. Gordon, Personality and behavior, page 158:

     In restitutive fantasy, the person imagines some goal object which is not present in the environment: the fantasy thus serves as a replacement for the absent real object. The lonely child imagines his parents when they are away from him.

   • 1985, Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats, page 256:

     If Keats cannot, in restitutive fantasy, resurrect "the teeming autumn, big with rich increase," his imagination will, in a second attempt, rise to another response in an effort to deny the obdurate blankness of the stubble-plains […]

   • 2007, Leon Wurmser, Torment Me, But Don't Abandon Me:

     The patient's aim is therefore that the analyst replace a missing part; it is not the process of self-exploration. The enactment of such a restitutive fantasy serves the defense against the depressive affect about loss: the defense against mourning.

   • 2013, Susan Miller, Shame in Context, page 116:

     Jeremy's father gave him a leg up into the restitutive fantasy of specialness by providing the adoption story of the “chosen” and “special” child.