In Totem and Taboo, Freud writes that magic, like religion, and science is a technique for gaining mastery of the world. But the world of Magic Man, is neither the religious world nor the scientific world. The technique corresponds to the world it operates on. The world that Magic Man experiences is not a real world. It takes a Scientific Man to experience reality. In a real world time matters, in an unreal world it doesn't. For Magic Man there is no space of time between here and there.

It is upon that space of time that reality and the unreal are hinged. From the perspective of Scientific Man, there has always been one world, the real one, and Magic Man and Religious Man simply misperceived reality. But human experience remains both real and unreal; Magic Man does not go away, he just resides in the basement. Development is repression.

The human body must repress itself to realize itself. Repression does not eliminate the repressed, it merely dominates it, and domination is a temporary condition; the repressed desires return. Despite the grip of Scentific Man, the human body of experience remains simultaneously real and unreal. There is no human experince free of fantasy. To understand the human is to understand the fantastic.