The Match-Girl's "Fantasying"

What do we make of how the Match-Girl uses her fantasies? Carl Jung made a great deal about the value of imagination. He even developed a technique he came to call active imagination—this was his method for exploring and assimilating unconscious contents. Jung also makes a great deal about the importance of regression and its finalistic purposefulness in progression. Both of these are different to what the Match-Girl is doing and how she is using her fantasies. We can speak of a regressive movement in her “fantasying,” yet the regression is not in service to the individuation impulse. Rather, her “fantasying” keeps her stagnant since the meaning is not discerned. Hence the images are not symbols which are capable of moving libido. The libido expended simply dies out.

D.W. Winnicott also has something to say about the “difference between fantasying and dreaming." For Winnicott dream is related to object-relating in the real world…"by contrast…fantasying remains an isolated phenomenon, absorbing energy but not contributing-in either to dreaming or to living…fantasying interferes with action and with life in the real or external world, but much more so it interferes with dream and with the personal or inner psychic reality, the living core of the individual personality.”