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Defenses

Autistic Fantasy

Autistic fantasy is retreating into daydreams instead of dealing with people or problems in real life. The daydream supplies what life doesn’t: love, admiration, power, a perfect comeback, a problem solved. The person knows it is a daydream. The trouble is that it takes the place of action instead of preparing for it. Despite the name, this defense has nothing to do with autism as it is diagnosed today; the term is much older (see History).

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person deals with conflict or stress “by excessive daydreaming as a substitute for human relationships, more direct and effective action, or problem solving” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The person may be aware of the “I’m just pretending” quality of the fantasy, and yet it “may be the closest that he or she ever comes to expressing or gratifying the need for satisfying interpersonal relationships.”

Fantasy offers temporary, second-hand satisfaction. While it lasts, the person feels good and “momentarily bypasses the conviction of powerlessness,” sometimes even feeling able to do anything. The DMRS stresses that fantasy is a problem “only when it short-circuits rather than rehearses attempts to deal with the real world.” The cost is that real needs stay unmet: the relationship isn’t pursued, the conversation isn’t had, and the problem waits.

Where It Sits

Autistic fantasy belongs to Level 3, the Disavowal Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. Disavowal defenses avoid acknowledging an unacceptable part of inner or outer reality, so that the person never fully takes up the problem as their own. Fantasy does this by quietly solving the problem in imagination. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed autistic fantasy lower, at its major image-distorting level, with projective identification and splitting. The DMRS groups it instead with denial, rationalization, and projection, and names the level “Disavowal defenses and autistic fantasy.”

Among the immature defenses, autistic fantasy is grouped with the non-depressive defenses, which protect self-esteem by disavowing or distorting reality rather than turning distress against the self.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify autistic fantasy:

Examples

The dreamer of Petersburg

The narrator of Dostoevsky’s story White Nights is a lonely young man who has lived in St. Petersburg for almost eight years. “I am twenty-six and I have never seen any one,” he tells a young woman he has just met. “I do nothing but dream every day that at last I shall meet some one.” He calls himself “a dreamer; I have so little real life” and describes the type: a man who settles into a corner “as though hiding from the light of day” and “ends by getting rid of all his friends.” In sober moments he fears that he has become “incapable of beginning a life in real life.” The narrator is fictional, and Dostoevsky is not describing a defense, but his dreamer fits the DMRS picture closely: daydreams in place of relationships, with full awareness that they are only dreams.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights (1848), “First Night” and “Second Night”

Peggy and the photograph

George Vaillant illustrated defenses using a hypothetical 16-year-old, Peggy O’Hara, caught between her first romance and a strict upbringing. Using fantasy, Peggy might “gaze at her boyfriend’s photograph and write steamy love poetry, which she would not send to him.” The feelings are fully alive, but only on paper and in her room. The price is in the real relationship: “to her boyfriend Peggy would appear eccentric and aloof.” Vaillant calls this defense “schizoid fantasy,” an older name the DMRS keeps in parentheses.

George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (1993), ch. 2

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Autism
The shared word is a historical accident. When Eugen Bleuler wrote of “autism” in 1911, he was describing a feature of schizophrenia: thinking that replaces unsatisfying reality with imagination. The word later came to name a developmental condition, and the researcher Michael Rutter argued that “the autistic child has a deficiency of fantasy rather than an excess.” Autistic fantasy, the defense, says nothing about autism.
Maladaptive daydreaming
Researchers have proposed “maladaptive daydreaming” as a clinical syndrome: compulsive, immersive daydreaming that takes up an hour or more a day, is often accompanied by music or repetitive movement, and is hard to cut back. It overlaps with autistic fantasy, but it describes a disorder, while autistic fantasy describes a way of coping that anyone may lean on at times.
Anticipation
Anticipation also uses imagination, but to rehearse: picturing a future difficulty, feeling some of the distress ahead of time, and preparing a realistic response. Autistic fantasy replaces the response with the daydream.
Delusion
Autistic fantasy involves no loss of contact with reality. The DMRS specifies that the person “knows the difference between reality and fantasy life.” A delusion is believed to be true.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count autistic fantasy among their characteristic defenses:

History

The psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler used “autism” in his 1911 book on schizophrenia to name one of the disorder’s core features. He described “autistic thinking” as a wish to escape unsatisfying realities by replacing them with imagination and hallucinations (Ribolsi et al., 2022). Into the mid-twentieth century, child psychologists and psychoanalysts still used “autism” for hallucinations and unconscious fantasy life; in Britain, its meaning shifted radically in the early 1960s toward the developmental condition known today (Evans, 2013).

George Vaillant included fantasy among the immature defenses in his hierarchy, under the name “schizoid fantasy.” Later (2011), he argued that immature defenses such as imaginary friends can appear annoying or pathological to others while actually reflecting the brain’s effort to cope with sudden change.

The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) adopted the name “autistic fantasy” and placed it at the major image-distorting level. J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which calls it “Autistic (or Schizoid) Fantasy,” places it at Level 3, the disavowal level.

Research supports the idea that fantasy can serve as a way of coping with stress. Raskin and Novacek (1991) found that people high in narcissism who were under more daily stress reported using more fantasies of self-admiration, power and revenge, and suffering to cope. More recently, building on Eli Somer’s 2002 qualitative study, researchers have described maladaptive daydreaming. A 2025 position paper by Soffer-Dudek and colleagues cited a point-prevalence estimate of 2.5% and argued that it should be recognized as a dissociative disorder.

Sources