Phantasia occupies a pivotal position in the ancient psychology of action, and the depth-psychology corpus treats it with corresponding seriousness. The term resists easy translation: rendered variously as imagination, appearance, sensory impression, or mental representation, it names a capacity that stands between raw perception and deliberate thought, mediating the passage from sensory input to motivated behavior. Lorenz’s sustained engagement with Aristotle’s De Anima and De Motu Animalium establishes the primary scholarly frame: phantasia is not a mere reproductive faculty but the cognitive mechanism by which animals — rational and non-rational alike — apprehend prospective situations and thereby form desires capable of driving locomotion. The distinction between perceptual phantasia, available to all animals, and deliberative or rational phantasia, proper to beings capable of reasoning, is a fault-line running through the entire discussion. Inwood extends the analysis into Stoic territory, noting that despite significant differences in epistemological role, both Aristotle and the Stoics assign phantasia a central position as the perceptual or noetic stimulus activating desire. Carson’s literary inflection of Aristotle underscores what is lost when phantasia fails: a city without desire is a city without imagination, without the interpretive spark that connects sensation to longing. Tensions persist around whether phantasia is required for all desire or only for locomotion-producing desire, and around its relationship to memory, belief, and thought.