" At the border of the unconscious and the conscious – or in Lacanian terms, at an edge between the Imaginary and the Symbolic- the fantastic, through all of its genres, struggles to undo the processes of signification and differentiation that are fundamental to psychological and social experience . Its narratives reflect the encounter between the I and the not-I that takes place in the development and enculturation of the self. For Freud, the processes of differentiation is staged at a moment between narcissism and object love. Lacan names it the "mirror stage", a phase of the Imaginary that he locates in the chaos and the real and the formal structures of the Symbolic. It is here that the self comes to know itself as object, as if it were reflected in the gaze of others. Freud's superego is born here, as is Lacan's ego-ideal. For both lacan and Freud, this is social self that watches, reproaches, and directs, enforcing the systems of cultural difference that are rooted in psychic differentiation. While realism expresses the boundaried aspirations of that self, the fantastic voices its desire to return to the wholeness that existed before the fall into fragmented subjectivity and cultural difference. While the realistic narrative thematizes a rational cultural order, the fantastic reproduces the contradictory strategies that the subject employs both to heal and to deny its alienation. Anxieties aroused by psychis fragmentation are projected in fantasy onto others who are then distinguished as radically different from the self, at the same time that the differences that threaten the ego's integrity are denied and union with the Other, who represents those differences, is experienced as essential for the self's completion. In the first instance, the Other is the object of intense fear and hatred; in the second, an object of equally intense desire."
             "It was not a story to pass on....It wa...