When problems become too much for us, we sometimes seek the “solution” of escape into a dream world, a solution based in fantasy rather than reality.
This was the solution of the child in the toy experiment, who lay on the floor reciting nursery rhymes and of other children in the experiment who in imagination crossed the barrier by talking about the whole toys on the other side. One girl fished through the wire, imaging the floor on the other side to be the pond that was actually out of reach.
Unrealistic solutions are not limited to children. The pin-up girl in soldiers barracks symbolize a fantasy life that goes on when normal social life with women is frustrated. Experiments have shown that men on a starvation diet lose their interest in women and instead hang on their walls pictures of prepared food cut from magazines (Guetzkowand Bowman, 1946).
As we shall see in the next chapter, severe and continuous frustration may produce such complete escape into fantasy that the individual loses the ability to distinguish between fantasy and the real world.