Freud and Klein on the concept of phantasy

The International Journal of Psycho-analysis
E B Spillius

Abstract

In summary, I think Freud's idea is that the prime mover of psychic life is the unconscious wish, not phantasy. The 'work' of making phantasies and the 'work' of making dreams are parallel processes in which forbidden unconscious wishes achieve disguised expression and partial fulfilment. For Freud himself, especially in his central usage, and even more for his immediate followers, phantasies are conceived as imagined fulfilments of frustrated wishes. Whether they originate in the system conscious or the system preconscious, they are an activity of the ego and are formed according to the principles of the secondary process. That is not the whole story, however, because phantasies may get repressed into the system unconscious, where they become associated with the instinctual wishes, become subject to the laws of the primary process, and may find their way into dreams and many other derivatives. For Freud and for French psychoanalysts particularly, there are the primal phantasies, 'unconscious all along', of the primal scene, castration and seduction, also capable of being directly incorporated into dreams and expressed through other derivatives. For Klein phantasy is an even more central concept than for Freud and it has contin...Continue Reading

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Citations

Feb 21, 2008·Zeitschrift für Gerontologie und Geriatrie·E Etzersdorfer
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