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Abstract
Starting with Freud's discovery of unconscious phantasy as a means of accessing his patients’ internal world, the author discusses the evolution of the concept in the work of Melanie Klein and some of her successors. Whereas Freud sees phantasy as a wish fulfilling imagination, dominated by primary process functioning and kept apart from reality testing, Klein understands phantasies as a structural function and organizer of mental life. From their very beginnings they involve object relations and gradually evolve from primitive body‐near experiences to images and symbolic representations. With her concept of projective identification in particular, Klein anticipates the communicative function of unconscious phantasies. They are at the basis of processes of symbolization, but may also be put into the service of complex defensive operations. The author traces the further evolution of the concept from the contributions of S. Isaacs, the theories of thinking proposed by W.R. Bion and R. Money‐Kyrle, Hanna Segal's ideas on symbolization and reparation all the way to the latest approaches by R. Britton, J. Steiner and others, including the understanding of transference and counter‐transference as a ‘total situation’. Points of contact with Freud are to be found particularly in connection with his concept of ‘primal phantasies’. In the author's view, the idea of the transmission and communicative potential of unconscious phantasies enabled these authors to overcome the solipsistic origins of drive theory in favour of a notion in which unconscious phantasies both set down the coordinates of the inner world and form and reflect the matrix of inter‐subjective relations.
1. A different version of this paper was published in Psyche – Z Psychoanal 67 (2013): 903–30.
2. Translated by Ursula Haug, London.
1. A different version of this paper was published in Psyche – Z Psychoanal 67 (2013): 903–30.
2. Translated by Ursula Haug, London.
Notes
1. A different version of this paper was published in Psyche – Z Psychoanal 67 (2013): 903–30.
2. Translated by Ursula Haug, London.
3. The term ‘phantasy’ is used in this paper to comprise both unconscious phantasies and conscious fantasies (see Isaacs, Citation1948).
4. Freud's original German expression ‘Zeitmarke’ might also be translated as ‘time signature’ (instead of ‘date‐mark’).
5. Letter to Wilhelm Fließ of 21 September 1897. Prior to this, in ‘Manuscript M’ Freud had already likened phantasy formation with “the amalgamation and corrosion analogous to the decomposition of a chemical body which is compounded to one another” (Citation1985, p. 247) and in the subsequent ‘Manuscript N’ he traced back “symptom formation by identification” with phantasies (p. 269). In the same ‘Manuscript M’ he alluded to the timelessness of unconscious phantasies (p. 247 f.).
6. In his paper ‘The Unconscious’ (Freud Citation1915c, p. 191) he describes the “phantasies of normal people as well as of neurotics which we have recognized as preliminary stages in the formation both of dreams and of symptoms”, as “highly organized and free from self‐contradiction”, but “unconscious and … incapable of becoming conscious”.
7. An exception to this might be the game with the reel of the 18 month‐old boy symbolizing the absence and presence of his mother described in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (Freud, Citation1920, pp. 14–17), where Freud linked the creative activity with the related thought processes, but did not establish a connection to the notion of phantasy.
8. “The object of an instinct is the thing in regard to which or through which the instinct is able to achieve its aim. It is what is most variable about the instinct and is not originally connected with it, but becomes assigned to it only in consequence of being particularly fitted to make satisfaction possible” (Freud, Citation1915a, p. 122).
9. See the contribution by Gabriella Giustino in this volume.
10. See the contribution by Gail S. Reed in this volume.
11. Bronstein suggests that it is the projection of early embodied phantasies that gives rise to emotionally evocative contact. She further shows that even if early embodied phantasies get modified in a symbolic way they don't disappear but continue to operate alongside and independently of words.
12. Thus, when Freud emphasizes under the heading ‘The Experience of Satisfaction’, the human being's dependence on “extraneous help”, when “the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child's state along the path of internal change. In this way this path of discharge acquires a secondary function of highest importance, that of communication” (Citation1950, p. 318). In the paragraph on ‘Remembering and Judging’ he adds that the “fellow human‐being” is at the same time the “first satisfying object and … first hostile object, as well as his sole helping power. For this reason it is in relation to the fellow human‐being that a human being earns to cognize” (p. 331). Here he clearly seems to acknowledge an epistemological and intersubjective function of primitive thinking (cf. Pagel, Citation1984).