No matter how far back Klein reaches into childhood, she always discovers a fantasizing ego. A sundry entity made up of verbal and nonverbal representations, sensations, affects, emotions, movements, actions, and even concretizations, the Kleinian phantasy is a wholly impure theoretical construct that defies the purists as much as it fascinates clinicians, particularly those who specialize in children, psychosis, or the psychosomatic disorders. And yet Melanie Klein never explicitly reconciled her various approaches to the term phantasy—in fact, it was an article written by her disciple Susan Isaacs that pursued that subject and rendered it credible.1

As a way to highlight the originality of Klein’s concept in the context of the famous Controversial Discussions that shook up the British Psycho-Analytical Society between 1941 and 19452 Susan Isaacs proposed the spelling “phantasy” in order to denote the psychic activity preceding the repression that interested Klein and to differentiate the phantasy from the daydreams, conscious or repressed, that psychoanalysts have traditionally placed under the rubric of “fantasy.” In Isaac’s view, “phantasy is (in the first instance) the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct. There is no impulse, no instinctual urge or response which is not experienced as unconscious phantasy.”3

Freud believed that fantasies did not begin before the second or third year of life, and he in fact conceived of fantasies in terms of his model of the dream. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud proposed a model of the psychic apparatus that describes it as a “locality” and compare it to a “photographic apparatus” that produces an image.4

Between the twin markers of perception and motivity, the psychic apparatus is made up of three types of memories: unconscious memories (that deepest and oldest ones), preconscious memories (the verbal and intermediary ones), and conscious memories. The dreamlike reverie known as the fantasy has what Freud considers to be a regressive character: the stimulation regresses to it and follows a retrograde path such that, rather than moving toward an extreme motivity, it approaches sensory extremity. “We call it ‘regression’ when in a dream an idea is turned back into the sensory image from which it was originally derived.”5 Although Freud emphasized that vision and the visual memory are particularly appealing to unconscious thoughts and thus enable them to be expressed, he never forgot that the totality of sensory domains is what is mobilized in the dream and, by extension, in the fantasy. Freud even expressed regret that his own dreams “are in general less rich in sensory elements that I am led to suppose is the case in other people.”6 Perhaps that explains why his notion of fantasy does not really incorporate these sensory elements.

By staging our unconscious desires, Freudian fantasies are fantasies of desires (Wiinschen), with the first desire being the hallucinatory investment of the memory of gratification. To those fantasies Freud adds “primal phantasies”7 that are more enigmatic and that contain prehistoric truths that the individual does not necessarily experience himself, but that unconsciously reappear in him to fill in the holes (as well as the fantasies of the primal scene, of castration, or of seduction).

        The richness and multilayered meanings of Freud’s insights here have been extended in various ways. Lacan was drawn to the visual side of the fantasy; he developed, through his notion of the mirror stage, an optic model that encompassed his own theory of the fantasy—which he claimed was faithful to Freud’s—and implicitly disagreed with Klein’s theory of the fantasy during a seminar devoted to a critique of her work.8 Lacan considered the eye to be the symbol of the subject, one that emerges before the birth of the ego. He described the onslaught of fantasies that spawned Klein’s interpretations in her case study of little Dick9 as “grafts”10 that functioned through the analyst’s speech: Mrs. Klein’s “signifier,” which proposes equivalences (of the sort “the train is your father”), is what stood the subject Dick in good stead and allowed him to see his unconscious desires and to travel down the path of speech.

This Lacanian critique is helpful because it illuminates one of the ways in which Klein’s method is effective: Lacan hightlights the effect of verbalization on the unconscious fantasy. For a child who understand language but who does not yet know how to speak—that is, a child who has language but not speech—the analyst’s naming of his fantasies helps him shift from a mental universe based on identities (the identity of the father and the train, as suggested by Dick’s playful actions) to a universe based on similarities (the similarity between the father and the penis, as was believed and put into words by the analyst)—and thus places the child in the realm of the imaginary.11 In treatment, this shift in domain (from identity to similarity) occurs with the help of the analyst’s speech. In Lacan’s view, Klein’s speech had the effect of facilitating Dick’s access to play, which until that point had remained rudimentary at best; Klein also exposed him to the domain of the symbolic, that is, to the domain of the thought that she articulated. The imaginary and the symbolic were therefore able to rise to the level of the young patient’s drive-based real—in the same way that, in the mathematical logic of the optical realm, the real and the imaginary become one, which must be stated explicitly. Though this visionary critique is thorough and appealing, it says nothing about the sundry nature of the fantasy, at least not in the context of Klein’s own conception as she projects herself onto her own regressive unconscious before giving it a sort of name—in a mythical way, it turns out, and in a way that is heavily laden with the drives.

It is true that the term projection, as it is used here, reflects the optical excess that Lacan correctly highlighted as part of his emphasis on the role of the eidos—of the idea—in the appearance of the drive in the fantasy, a role that had been neglected by his predecessors’ native empiricism. Lacan’s refocus on the metaphysical foundations of representation comes at the cost, however, of retreating from the world of the Kleinian fantasy/phantasy.

“At first,” as Susan Isaacs puts it, “the whole weight of wish and phantasy is borne by sensation and affect.”12 It is true that if we read closely, as does Jean-Michel Petot, the first analyses of children that Klein recounted in The Psychoanalysis of Children, we will be inclined to agree with Isaacs’s conclusion. The unconscious or preconscious fantasy is present in all psychic activities and behaviors, so much so that the fantasy is an “active presence of fantasy scenes.” Such a fantasy is, strictly speaking, bound up with motivity, taste and food aversions, the sharpness of the perception (particularly the visual perception) of the primal scene the image of the body, voice-song-and-speech, sporting activities concert-show-and-film attendance, educational and intellectual activities, neurotic symptoms, and, in the end, the entire organization of the personality. Not only is the totality of psychic life impregnated with fantasies, but in the children whom Klein listened to and analyzed, the fantasy—that is, the fantasy that precedes repression—is united with psychic life because this fantasy and this life, “the representatives of the earliest impulses of desire and aggressiveness, are expressed in and dealt with by mental processes far removed from words and conscious relational thinking.”

This brings up one of the most difficult problems in psychoanalytic theory, one that Klein’s clinical approach addressed creatively without theorizing the concept as such, thereby leaving it to her successors to explore a subject that is the focus of current psychoanalytic inquiry: what is psychic representation? Or, put another way, what are the psychic representations?

Because Klein returned to the “whole weight of sensation and affect” in the primary fantasy, she could justly boast of her faithfulness to Freud’s thought. Isn’t it true that Freud, a few pages after he compares the psychic apparatus to a photographic apparatus in his Interpretation of Dreams (1900), outlines the regressive “trace” of sensation? Similarly, the Kleinian “phantasy” includes by implication the memory traces described in “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’”(1925)15 without being identical with them, and her “phantasy” adds such traces to the “photographic apparatus” in the sense of a model of psychic representation. Still, as compared with the amalgam of diverse domains of representation that define the Kleinian phantasy (sensation, affects, gestures, actions, verbal and nonverbal representations, and even the concretizations themselves to which fantasies and psychotic suffering are sometimes reduced—and that is just the beginning), Freud’s notion of the “representation” of the drive in the psychic apparatus connotes a meaning that is far more “diplomatic”16 than is Klein’s. Put another way, the Kleinian phantasy includes elements that emerge before representation or without it altogether, elements that her followers would seek to conceptualize. Lacan, for his part, adopted a decidedly Greek approach by shifting psychic representation toward the appearance and toward the visibility of the eidos. Psychoanalysis today focuses on this clinical and conceptual exploration of the transverbal archaic realm that Melanie brought to our attention, a realm that belies ideal or visual representation.17

It is true that both Isaacs and Klein use the term fantasy, a term whose etymology clearly evokes appearance-presence-and-vision, but both women distance the term from its Greek etymological and metaphysical origins and saturate it instead with the reality of drives and with such primary “contained” contents as greed and envy. What is more, the sensation of a drive in the psychic apparatus is automatically associated with the fantasy of an object that is appropriated to it, with each incitement of the drives having its own corresponding fantasy (the desire for good, for example, is associated with the affect of hunger and the breast object). From the moment of birth, the drive engages in a binary expression: sensation/affect18 and the object both coexist, and the presentation of the object clings to sensation. The kleinian phantasy is the mechanism of this juncture, of the drives’ destiny to be both inside an outside: it is an “object-seeking” drive.19 

Fantasies are not context simply to incite the drives, for they also play a defensive role by producing feelings of gratification that are independent of reality—and that may even deteriorate reality. Such feelings reinforce the omnipotence of the ego and allow it to defend itself against its own destruction (in this sense, the fantasy of being attacked by the “bad” breast is a defense against the feeling of destroying oneself by attacking the “good” breast).

Because of this protopresence of the fantasy and this protopresence of the ego, the destiny of the drive is not circumscribed by the conditions of an external reality. This brings up a central feature of Klein’s theory: with regard to psychic life, fantastical fear and anxiety have a greater impact than does the real separation between mother and child, regardless of whether such separation is enduring, dramatic, or neither of the two. The fantasy—by representing not reality, but the duo of “drive and internal object,” and by anticipating the future while overestimating the threats that future poses—transforms deprivation into frustration. From that point on, a degree of negativity informs the fantasy-like activity, one that goes through several stages before it accesses the capacity to symbolize through language and thought. According to the whims of the object relation, such reinforced negativity generates a series of fantasies: sadistic, paranoid-schizoid, manic, and depressive fantasies that pave the way for an optimal representation of the drives by working through them, that is, by integrating split-off objects and the reinforcement of the ego. In Klein’s view, the fantasy is still wholly bound up with the constants of the unconscious: anxiety, greed, and gratitude.

Is the fantasy a metaphor? It most certainly is, in the sense that it replaces one object by another or condenses one object into another. Still, Melanie Klein was not enamored of the simple rhetorical trope of the metaphor, nor was she drawn to plays on words. Instead, she preferred the axis of similarity that provides a space for the sort of metaphoric substitution that occurs in the fantasy (for example, the “train” as a replacement for “papa” and the “penis”). The therapist posited, in fact, that a comparable anxiety of destruction comes on the heels of a repressed libido: the same sort of anxiety latches on to “papa,” the “train,” and the “penis” and permeates the entire sequence or condensation of the series of objects and words that are fungible in the child’s imaginary. This logical process stems from the omnipresence of an Oedipus conflict in which the desire for the mother and the feelings of rivalry toward the father are fused together by the death drive.20

Furthermore, when Melanie Klein interpreted her patients’ fantasies—in both children and adults—she was simply describing to them the Oedipus myth as embellished by a primordial and destructive sadism. As a result, the meaning of the fantasy that she “grafted” upon them is not a random “signifier” that symbolizes the more or less dichotomous chaos of drives by introducing them into the tripartite structure of linguistic signs. On the contrary—and this point is important—the goal is to inscribe the fantasy in an oedipal container that surrounds the autonomy of the subject as well as in the prevalence of the death drive, whose ambiguity never failed to impress Klein because it is clearly destructive but also, under certain conditions, highly constructive. It should come as no surprise, then, that the theorist does not speak of “primal fantasies”: no matter how diverse Kleinian phantasies may be as they respond to the various “positions” that they reflect, they are intrinsically “primal” and are brought about by an extremely early Oedipus conflict and by the permanence of the death drive.

Interpretations by the analyst herself, which are bound up in transference and countertransference, are an integral part of the fantasy under analysis. Interpretation is the upper psychic face of the fantasy—its symbolic elaboration into a myth or a body of knowledge (as myths are our archaic bodies of knowledge, and our bodies of knowledge concerning human essence can never be completely separated from myths). In the end, in fact, through the uncanny encounter that occurs in treatment between the child’s fantasy-play (or the adult patient’s associative fantasy) and the analytic interpretation moored in the Oedipus complex and the death drive, the fantasy adopts all the features of a metaphor incarnate.