Unconscious phantasy: Some historical and conceptual dimensions

This paper seeks firstly to grasp both conceptually and historically the different phenomenologies that are captured by the term ‘Unconscious Phantasy’. The term is shown to refer to a number of distinct though overlapping conceptual domains. These include: phantasy as scene, phantasy as representation of drive, phantasy as representation of wish as its fulfilment, phantasy as split off activity of the mind functioning under the aegis of the pleasure principle; phantasy as representation of the minds own activities (which Wollheim calls’ the way “the mind represents its own activities to itself’’). Lastly unconscious phantasy is understood as being the basic foundation of all mental life, including drives, impulses, all anxiety situations and defences. Having mapped out this territory through following the development of the concept in the work of Freud and Klein, the author draws on the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim who, the author contends, has made a fundamental contribution to our conceptual understanding of unconscious phantasy. In the last section of the paper, the author draws a distinction between what he terms ‘objects’ (namely psychic objects) and what he terms ‘facts’. It is suggested that this distinction, though implicit in much of our work, benefits from being made explicit and that in so doing an important dimension of analytic work is illuminated. We aim to help the patient to discover what he is like, to understand the ways in which he conceives and misconceives himself, to unravel the fact‐ness of himself and his world from its ‘object qualities’, to differentiate between unconscious phantasy and reality.     

Unconscious phantasy as a structural principle and organizer of mental life: The evolution of a concept from Freud to Klein and some of her successors

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.     

VALUES,DESIRES, AND LOVE: REFLECTIONS ON WOLLHEIM'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

In The Thread of Life, Richard Wollheim argues that a person's sense of value is grounded in the power of love to generate certain favourable perceptions of an object. Following from his view is a psychoanalytic conception of valuing as constituted by the imaginative force of phantasy, rather than rational deliberation. In this paper, I shall defend this conception with a view to explaining the relation between values and desires. I suggest that valuing qua phantasy‐making can ‘tune up’ a person's desires to fit his perception of the good. Such power of phantasy is to be contrasted with various types of motivational failure in moral imagination. Finally, I argue that ‘effective valuing’, which makes us capable of desiring what we perceive to be good, requires an affective kind of imagination which assures us that we have the ability to love and to be loved.     

The Phenomenon of Ego-Splitting in Husserl’s Phenomenology of Pure Phantasy

Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination embraces a cluster of different theories and approaches regarding the multi-faced phenomenon of imaginative experience. In this paper I consider one aspect that seems to be crucial to the understanding of a particular form of imagination that Husserl names pure phantasy. I argue that the phenomenon of Ego-splitting discloses the best way to elucidate the peculiarity of pure phantasy with respect to other forms of representative acts (such as remembering) and to any simple form of act modification (such as neutrality modification). First, I unravel the phenomenological distinctions which, respectively, oppose phantasy to perception, on the one hand, and phantasy to other forms of the so-called “intuitive re-presentations”. Second, I introduce the difference between presentative and representative acts, arguing that this cannot help us to single out the defining feature of phantasy experiences. The third section draws again an important distinction between pure phantasy and neutrality modification, which allows me to finally determine an internal trait of phantasy experiences, which Husserl refers to as the “Ego-splitting” (Ichspaltung). In this way, I hope to contribute to a refined characterization of Husserl’s phenomenology of imagination.     

Play,Idleness and the Problem of Necessity in Schiller and Marcuse

The central concern of this paper is to explore the efforts of Schiller's post-Kantian idealism and Marcuse's critical theory to develop a new conception of free human experience. That conception is built on the notion of play. Play is said to combine the human capacities for physical pleasure and reason, capacities which the modern world has dualized. Analysis of their respective accounts of play reveals its ambivalent form in the work of both philosophers. Play supports the ideal of ‘freedom from necessity’, understood as a release from all external constraint. But it also appears to serve as a model for ‘freedom as a higher necessity’. In the case of Schiller, the ambivalence encompasses idle play and an obligation to make ourselves worthy of freedom. For Marcuse, play represents a kind of libidinal idleness while also underpinning a non-alienated conception of labour.     

The Many Senses of Imagination and the Manifestation of Fiction: A View from Husserl’s Phenomenology of Phantasy

The systematic importance of the eidetic account of phantasy for Husserlian phenomenology in general is undisputed, but whether this account can be relevant for Aesthetics has often been put into question. In this paper I argue that Husserl’s rich phenomenology of phantasy, and in particular his account of perceptual phantasy, can nevertheless significantly enhance our understanding of how we recognize and imaginatively participate in artistic fictions. Moreover, I show how Husserl’s peculiar formulation of a non-intuitive phantasy at stake in artistic representation anticipates some uses of the imagination in Aesthetics suggested by Ernst Gombrich and Kendall Walton.     

A Christmas fairy tale

The paper takes its title from Freud's early paper on the neuroses of defence. Using approaches based on the psychoanalytic study of mythology, the author reviews the emotional and symbolic significance of Santa Claus as embodying forms of meaning at Christmas. Historical data and mythic images are considered, using as a means of interpretation ideas from Freud, Jung, Klein and Winnicott. The suggestion emerges that Santa Claus personifies a restitution of the primal scene that has been destroyed in primal phantasy. Some applications of these ideas are considered in relation to psychoanalytic approaches to work organization.     

Sexual identity and choice of sexual object: From bisexuality to implicate order

Abstract

Stensson J. Sexual Identity and Choice of Sexual Object: From Bisexuality to Implicate Order. Int Forum Psychoanal 1992; 1:93-97. Stockholm. ISSN 0803-706 X

Freud's concept of bisexuality leads to contradictory consequences. Seeing choice of sexual object in the light of unconscious primal phantasies as coding systems, unfolds new possibilities. Taking the primal scene phantasy as a preconceptual code for mature sexuality, I make a limited and preliminary attempt to outline some possible outcomes of interactions between primal scene and oral phantasies, taking help from the theoretical physicist David Bohm's ideas on implicate order.     

From symbolic law to narrative capacity: A paradigm shift in psychoanalysis?1

In the Freudian perspective, the primal phantasies, a refl ection of prehistory, oblige us through our phylogenetic heritage and its repetition in the ontogenetic to recognize the limits of generation and sex, to submit to the symbolic law represented by the father of the primal horde and to fi nd‐as is sought in the treatment‐one's ‘right’ place in the primal scene (Oedipus complex). Clinical experience with patients suffering from narcissistic disorders soon led certain analysts to propose a paradigm change, which has brought about important modifi cations to technique, but also, more recently, modifi cations at the level of metapsychology. Certain contemporary analysts have a conception of the subject focused on processes of interaction and communication between ‘thinking apparatuses’ in the here and now. The author shows that this current development is taking place in parallel with major trends in our postmodern era in which communication and negotiation replace former religious, mythical, philosophical, moral or political beliefs.     

‘Translation’ and ‘transformation’ in the analytic situation: Freud – Bion – Laplanche

Following a short introduction to the core theses of Jean Laplanche’s theory of a ‘general seduction’ the author presents the resultant clinical position of the analyst. In the same way that an adult sends ‘enigmatic messages’ to the child, it is the analyst’s task to reopen this primal situation so that the patient can find new ‘translations’ for these messages. Laplanche distinguishes between the function of the analytic frame – which represents and supports attachment – and the ‘sexual’– which is the repressed and constitutes the unconscious. Only the focus on this unconscious facilitates the deconstruction of ‘incorrect’ translations. Accordingly, the analyst, says Laplanche, should not take part in construction – this is a self‐construction of the patient – but only in reconstruction. The author compares this clinical model with Freud’s notions and the ‘transformation processes’ through the alpha function as described by Bion. She illustrates Laplanche’s model and the interpretation strategy with case material.     

What is the function of faith and trust in psychoanalysis?1

Unlike other concepts such as ‘illusion’, ‘capacity to tolerate frustration’ and ‘libidinal investment’, the concept of faith has not yet found a well‐defined position in psychoanalytic theory. Bion focused on faith and placed it in an unusual context: scientific work. Through the Act of Faith a researcher can give some consistency to certain ideas, hunches or intuitions that may appear during observation, though he cannot represent them by existing theory. Through the Act of Faith an analyst can ‘see’, ‘hear’ and ‘feel’ those mental phenomena, the reality of which leaves no practising psychoanalysts in doubt, even if they cannot represent them by current formulations. In this paper, the author aims to expand Bion's proposals into the clinical and therapeutic fields. In the first part, the author examines how faith and trust overlap, and how they depart from each other, and he gives an example. Faith possesses an igniting and driving force which trust doesn't possess to the same extent. In the second part, the author looks at F as a psychic function of the analyst, which aids him in supporting a depressed and hopeless patient while waiting for the return of the patient's desire to live. In the final part, he focuses on F from the patient's point of view and studies the transformations of F that may occur during an analysis.     

The capacity to symbolise: Ideas and implications

Through a literature review and clinical examples of session material and dreams, this paper explores aspects of the origin and development of the capacity to symbolise. The literature review considers Freud’s thinking on symbols in dreams, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, Klein’s discovery of the importance of unconscious phantasy, Bion’s ideas on the psychotic part of the mind and Bick’s seminal ideas on skin as an important symbolic boundary between psyche and soma. The clinical material in this paper is used to demonstrate the capacity to symbolise, reasons for the impairment of this capacity, and how the translation of symbols through interpretation in a therapeutic setting can enable the symbols to acquire meaning. It includes examples both of the author’s work with adults and of other clinicians’ work with a child and an adolescent in a psychotic state of mind. The paper’s aim is to consolidate the idea that the capacity to symbolise grows out of an optimal early parent/child relationship and that the awareness of the significance of the symbols when they have been interpreted is of crucial importance.     

Further developments of the concept of fantasy

After the Isaacs' seminal work on the nature and function of unconscious phantasy (1948), several authors (mostly in the British Society) have reflected on the topic and tried to extend the concept of fantasy. In this paper I shall examine the contributions of Winnicott, Gaddini, Joseph and Anne Marie Sandler that aim at broadening this psychoanalytic concept. The authors that I have considered share a focus mostly on the early stages of child development. Both Winnicott and Gaddini belong to a line of thinking that explores the vicissitudes of the primary emotional development of the infantile self (in the mother‐infant relationship) involving the earliest processes of holding and bodily and kinaesthetic fantasy that form the bodily integrity of the person. The Sandlers focused mostly on the concept of the past unconscious understood as a place of primitive vicissitudes with a deficit in figuration where the process of repression is missing. The present unconscious phantasy (that is located in the here and now) has the function of rendering the past unconscious phantasy partly accessible; otherwise it would remain unknowable.     

‘Strong European emotions’: The politics of culture in the EU

In 2007 four video clips released by the European Union Media Programme achieved overnight popularity in their ability to present and capture the emotional core of being European (the clips can be seen on EUtube). The clips were designed to promote the Media Programme (2007–2013) and to encourage European citizens to identify with something that all of them have in common: ‘Love’, ‘Romanticism’, ‘Joy’ and ‘Sadness’. The clips have gained considerable interest. The video clip titled ‘Love’ has become the most watched European Union video clip ever. It shows eighteen couples having sex.In this paper I analyse the way in which such images mobilize the pleasures of fantasmic identification with the embodied agents of love and sex – images that viewers enjoy as consumers of popular culture – and how these pleasures are linked to the processes of supranational (European) identity building. In doing so, inspired by Sara Ahmed's work on the cultural politics of emotions and Ernesto Laclau's work on populism, I open a set of questions about the libidinal character or the affective dimensions of identification which images employ in order to construct identity formations. I argue that these clips are mechanisms that attempt to contribute to the construction of European supranational identity. They are part of the big network of projects established by European public policy makers that strive to produce ‘European culture’. They are designed not so much to give information about so-called ‘European emotions’ but to construct a European public. Each clip represents ambiguities which surround concepts of European culture and identity.     

Das Ding as Object of Melancholia

While Freud’s account of melancholia stresses the role of a lost object, a Lacanian approach draws attention to the role of an intruding and excessive “real” object and the inability of the psychotic subject to adequately shield themselves from the traumatic jouissance associated with it. While initially these approaches seem to contradict one another, this short commentary argues that the loss of an imaginary (ego-supporting) object (as per Freud’s conceptualization of psychosis) may be coterminous with the invasive presence of an object of a different order—that of the Lacanian real. We are able to better appreciate the particularity of this invasive object by reference to Lacan’s notion—itself derived from Freud—of das Ding. Das Ding is that “object” of amassed primal jouissance, which—like a black hole—corresponds to its own absence and which, in its terrifying and sublime materializations, brings together the three crucial Freudian concepts of libidinal overproximity, unmodulated jouissance, and the death drive.     

Heidegger,Art, and the Overcoming of Metaphysics

In this paper, I advance a new interpretation of Heidegger's reflections on art as we find them in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I begin, in Section 1, by uncovering the fundamental concern that motivates Heidegger's essay. I show that Heidegger's reflections on art are part of his attempt to uncover a path beyond the history of metaphysics. I then suggest, in Section 2, that while Heidegger does think that art may allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, recent interpreters [Dreyfus ( 2005 ), Thomson ( 2011 ), and Young ( 2001 )] have mistook the kind of art that Heidegger has in mind here. The kind of art that can allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, I argue, is not art that simply thematizes and/or reconfigures cultural worlds (as these interpreters have argued). It is instead what Heidegger calls ‘primal poesy’. After discussing the nature of primal poesy, I show in more detail how this kind of art may be capable of getting us beyond the history of metaphysics in Section 3. Finally, in Section 4, I reconsider the more common reading of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in light of the interpretation I've offered in Sections 2 and 3.     

Recollection and phantasy: The problem of the truth of memory in Husserl’s phenomenology

The epistemological problem of the truth of memory cannot be resolved without establishing a clear distinction between recollection and phantasy. Husserl’s position in this regard is both paradoxical and compelling. It is paradoxical because Husserl repeats his antiskeptical intention many times; but nevertheless in his phenomenology, recollection and phantasy are almost completely identical. Perhaps no philosopher has so radically approached the experience of remembering and the experience of fantasizing as Husserl. But at the same time, the recognition of this fundamental similarity is precisely what allows the phenomenologist to avoid empiricist misunderstandings and thus approach the problem of the distinction between recollection and phantasy in a much more persuasive way than the traditional one. In this paper, I will first try to show how and why Husserl approaches recollection and phantasy. Then I will try to show how it is possible to establish a clear distinction between these two phenomena without misunderstanding the possibility of false memory.     

Sexual metaphor and the language of unconscious phantasy

This paper investigates the attempt to find a 'bedrock' for psychic life in the idea of unconscious phantasy. Through a detailed examination of the development of the concept of unconscious phantasy, especially in Kleinian discourse, it is argued that unconscious phantasies are inherently metaphorical and have no 'concrete' existence in the unconscious. The use of unconscious phantasy as metaphor enables a 'two-way' form of interpretation that describes sexual behaviour and fantasy in terms of object relations (interpreting 'away from sex', while simultaneously describing object relations in terms of the sexual body (interpreting 'towards sex').     

Mindful Parenting: a group approach to enhancing reflective capacity in parents and infants

In this paper, the process of ending therapy is likened to the ordinary developmental task of ‘letting go’ that parents have to undertake, to help their child to grow up. ‘Letting go’ is contrasted with the process of ‘holding’ the child in mind that is so central to the therapeutic and parental task Following thoughts about some of the external issues that play a part in the decision to end a child's treatment, this developmental perspective of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is discussed through a clinical illustration of the ending of a 5-year-old boy's treatment. Different strands of the therapeutic relationship as highlighted during the ending phase of therapy are distinguished and attention is drawn to the role of the ‘new relationship’ between therapist and child and how this differs from the transference relationship. Countertransference issues in their broadest form are also considered.