potentialities

Don't you love it when you come across a piece of jargon or term of art that expresses something you had wanted to say with grace and concision?¹

I was reading Amy Richlin's chapter on reading Ovid's rapes in the collection of essays that she edited on Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, where she alludes to "the model of fantasy derived from psychoanalytic theory, in which the subject oscillates among the terms of the fantasy" and instantly I thought yes, that, precisely!

I put in yet another interlibrary loan request for the work cited in case I found anything else interesting in there, but just that single phrase is perfect to me.

¹And, relatedly, can you suggest a more elegant way to put that? *g*