A Dynamic Approach to Compulsive Fantasy: Constraints and Creativity in “Maladaptive Daydreaming”

Compulsive fantasy, often called “maladaptive daydreaming,” involves frequent engagement with immersive fantasies that can sometimes interfere with everyday life and cause distress. This paper expands on Christoff and colleagues’ Dynamic Framework of Thought (DFT) to offer a process-based analysis of compulsive fantasy as it relates to other mental phenomena such as daydreaming and creative thought. Drawing on the existing literature and posts on online forums by self-identified maladaptive daydreamers, we also propose an account of how compulsive fantasy episodes may unfold in terms of the oscillating dynamics of various constraints on thought, and how these dynamics may be related to a perceived struggle with agency. Automatic constraints, including affective salience and mental habits, may bring about a fantasy episode. During a fantasy episode, automatic constraints may be relatively high throughout, whereas deliberate constraints may be intermittently engaged to influence the fantasy. Our analysis supports the use of “compulsive fantasy” as a more accurate designation than “maladaptive daydreaming” for this phenomenon: compulsive fantasies are not daydreams, because they are more constrained in their mental dynamics. We show that fantasy and daydreaming are not inherently harmful but can become so when they are accompanied by relatively strong and sustained automatic constraints on thought.