Early modern psychology theorized fantasy as corrupting sense data before reason could judge

Evidence

The role of imagination is a critical part of this story. The English had a particularly astute understanding of how this faculty functioned in relation to the mind; in fact, this understanding bears an uncanny resemblance to Bourdieu’s concern with fantasy masquerading as reality. According to this view, “[a] lways the imagination of fantasy is seen as a power operating in a framework of other faculties and functions. In a definite hierarchical order of communication, knowledge travels from the so-called ‘outer’ senses (the five primary senses), to the ‘inner’ (Common Sense, Imagination and/or Fantasy, Sensible Reason, and Memory, which occupy cells in the brain), and thus to the highest rational, incorporeal powers (the Intellect or Wit or Understanding, and the Will).” The internalization of fantasies about Jews and Muslims depended upon “the transmission of data through a hierarchy of powers.” — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 238

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The five-senses-to-inner-wits-to-intellect hierarchy is a genuinely counterintuitive mechanism claim: the English understood that fantasy, positioned mid-stream in cognition, could masquerade as reality before the higher rational powers could intervene — an early modern cognitive model for how prejudicial images lodge in the mind, prefiguring Bourdieu.
• XREF: This hierarchy of powers is precisely the mechanism for ‘fear without an object’ the reader is hunting — it explains HOW the manufactured image got internalized prior to contact. — connects to: Early-century concepts like cathexis and ego defense anticipated implicit attitudes — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 270
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the early modern English faculty psychology as an actual theory of propaganda — how images enter through the lower senses and saturate before reason reviews them.