Fantasizing as Process, Not Fantasy as Content: The Importance of Mental Organization

Abstract

It is suggested that the traditional way of thinking about and working with unconscious fantasy inadvertently retains outdated topographical approaches to analytic technique. Shifting our analytic emphasis to the process of unconscious fantasizing better accounts for the importance of mental organization in understanding psychopathological phenomena and guiding analytic technique. This reformulation has two significant implications: (1) It highlights the importance of making the process of fantasizing conscious because access to this process can facilitate the analytic process and the attainment of insightfulness; and (2) it also emphasizes the need eventually to explore the reasons that a patient chooses fantasy over abstract, symbolic modes of experiencing and communicating internal phenomena.