Recent studies inspired by cognitive science appear to confirm Klein’s hypothesis of a proto-fantasy in the baby in the sense of a quasi-narration that articulates the drive and desire and that hones in on the object (the breast, the mother) to ensure the survival of the phobic and sadistic young ego.

In children under a year old, it is true that one can observe “generalized event representations,” “story schema,” or “cognitive affective models” that, from the beginning, adopt the form of a “prenarrative envelope.”21 Such an envelope reflects a subjective reality that is primarily affective and that displays the logical properties of the drive: desire (or motivation), an aim, its realization, an unraveling in time, repetition, an association of memories, a line of dramatic tension tantamount to a primal story, and so forth. As an emotional, physical, and already subjective experience that bases itself on drives that function in an interpersonal context, this prenarrative envelope is thus a mental construction that emerges from the “real” world; it is an “emergent property” of thought. Under this framework, various “centers” tasked with controlling a host of mental processes (sensation, the needs of the drives, motivity, language, place, time, and so forth)—also known as parallel distribution processing, or PDP—are able to coordinate themselves at a higher level by integrating with a unified event whose structure is similar to the structure of narration.

Just as generative grammar theory posited the existence of innate linguistic competence (with a limited matrix for each utterance: subject-verb-object) that is manifested later on in the form of grammatical performances that follow the rules of a given language, our current understanding is that a basic, if not innate, narrative structure begins to take shape from the moment of the newborn’s first drive-based interactions. From that perspective, “prenarrative envelope” are accompanied by “cognitive representations” that are neither a pure experience nor a pure abstraction but intermediaries between the two. The fantasy, then, is a cognitive representation of a narrative envelope experienced in real time.

This theoretical insight is quite appealing, but we must keep in mind that the analytic experience that it draws upon also reveals that the fantasy (and thus the narrative envelope itself) is inscribed in an emotional context that must precede any realization of the fantasy sequence. More specifically, the fantasy acts in this way through the oral-anal-genital destructive drives to which it is inextricably linked. Put another way, the prenarrative sequence that characterizes the formal logic of the fantasy depends on the possibility of expressing –or of not expressing—this destructiveness. On the one hand, the child manifests such destructiveness, and on the other hand, the mother recognizes it through its conduit, which is the death drive. The famous case study of young Dick demonstrates this point brilliantly.

Kleinian and post-Kleinian clinical practice, which has proved that a narrative thought is contained in the protofantasy, is founded not upon the locus of early narrative logic but on the locus of the primary anxiety that is a precondition for thought, provided that the object acknowledges it and rejoices in it (by way of the mother, or, even better, the analyst).

We also witness such excessive anxiety when we encounter modifications in the canonical narrative scheme, whether they be in a patient’s free associations or in a novelist’s technique. At the same time, moreover, the psychoanalytic experience shows us that protofantasy, as a “prenarrative envelope” of an “emergent property” requires the speech of the other before in can become a fantasy. Although it is true that Klein emphasized the preverbal and affective side of the narrative envelope known as the fantasy, she also linked it—through the very intervention of the analytic framework—with the analyst’s verbal interpretation, which in turn, through the help of the analyst’s own words, guides prenarration toward the narrated fantasy itself. Indeed, the narrative that consists of the therapist’s named fantasy, which interprets the protofantasy enacted by the child, raises the child’s emergent thought to a third level: a level that shall be termed symbolic, one in which primary anxiety, recognized and restored as such in the narrative of interpretation, encounters optimal conditions for the child’s own narration to prevail before other forms of thought even enter the picture.

Although the notion of the Kleinian phantasy as a metaphor incarnate allows us, as we have seen, to appreciate the uniqueness of both the childlike fantasy and the psychotic fantasy and to appreciate their heterogeneity—its representations and “concretizations”—this notion also presents risk. And they are significant ones: in analytic treatment, the danger is in underestimating the metaphoric meaning of the fantasy—to see only the reality of substantiated objects and to ignore the role of metaphor, that is, to ignore this imaginary metaphoricity and to remain stuck in a psychological realism. In that case, the analyst would succumb to the symbolic equations of psychosis and might even run the risk of encouraging psychosis itself because he has deprived himself of the necessary means to transform those equations into an effective symbolization.

The Controversial Discussions22 highlighted these pitfalls, and a close reading of the Kleinians’ rebuttal suggests that both Melanie and her followers were cognizant of this possibility. The Kleinians distinguish between the patient’s imaginary and the analyst’s imaginary, the latter being quite fruitful, in their estimation, because it is the privileged material of analytic work as practiced with varying degrees of grace in the space between the boundaries of psychotic concretizations, and because it reflects predisposition to adapt to a normative reality. The Controversial Discussions also appear to have arrived at just the right time to usher in this enlightenment, an enlightenment that would not have occurred without the intervention of the debates—even if these dangers still endure, and even if many practitioners still confuse the domains of the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic, which Lacan later distinguished with much fervor.23 

Other analysts have taken the precaution of distinguishing the various interpretive domains of analytic treatment in the light of the regressive psychic movement toward the drive and the sense. This demand for rigor is reflected in the work of Bion, who supported an analytic theory rooted in a metaphoric language that describes psychic reality. Because Bion feared that such a language might itself induce people to confuse the domains, he relied on such abstract notions as L, H, and K: “(I) X loves Y; (2) X hates Y; and (3) X knows Y. These links will be expressed by the signs L, H and K.”24 Motivated by a similar concern, Winnicott emphasized that psychic phenomena are processes, a notion he insisted upon to the point of abusing the gerund form: being, living, dreaming, fantasizing….At root, however, both men remained loyal to Klein’s conception of a primary—if not primitive or primal—psychic functioning that is manifested in the mental experience of the baby and of the psychotic through such terms as Winnicott’s “primitive retaliation” and Bion’s “nameless dreads,” or through what they both considered to be formlessness or a “thing-in-itself.”

Did the confrontation with this fantasy-like primary universe result from the psychoanalyst’s regression? Did it stem from a theoretical deficiency that was compensated for by the imagination of the therapist, who became troubled by the enigmatic functioning of a baby or of a psychotic who resists verbalization? Or, on the contrary, did Klein’s empirical forays reflect the intrinsic need for analytic listening because the fantasy is the one true object of every analyst? It is only by accompanying the analyst’s own fantasy with an image of itself that the analyst can guide the patient, always incompletely, toward psychic truth and encourage the patient’s encounter with reality. That process does not, for all that, inspire a skepticism about the knowledge of the human experience but, rather, the certainty that the imaginary is the very locus of truth, without which truth would be bound up with repression.

On the other hand, those who try to ignore the fantasy—either by vitiating it by contracting it or by undervaluing the imaginary—are doomed to be unable to hear the unconscious material whose only means of appearing is in the fantasy itself. At best, such analysts can listen to the material in their clinic, but they will resist it through their religiously purified theories. It is worthy of note that it was women (Klein, Isaacs, and Heimann) who had the courage in this debate to emphasize the role of the fantasy in the process of knowledge, while men such as Bion, Winnicott, and, in his own way, Lacan were left using the symbolic to curb the imaginary. Not only did Klein work on the imaginary (of the child) and in the imaginary (of the analyst), but her work was so deep and intense that the interaction between the two imaginaries (the child’s and the analyst’s) as they focus on bodies and their acts can only give impression that we are digging into our guts in the manner of “an inspired gut butcher,” as Lacan once quipped.

Perhaps we should seek a more empathetic approach to Klein’s fantastical forays into fantasies. By placing herself as close as possible to frustration—rather than to graftification, Klein did not fail to substantiate the unconscious, which from a certain perspective she could be accused of doing. On the contrary, she reclaimed this anamorphosis of the body into the mind, of sensations and affects into signs, and vice verse—an anamorphosis in which the word “imaginary” remains far too one-dimensional, but also one for which Christianity has invented the term incarnation. “Melanie Klein was able to give life to the unconscious, and metaphor absorbs its incarnate features.25

And yet Klein rejected the idealist and idealizing tendencies of the version of Christianity that uses the logic behind incarnation to repress the body and sex in the name of spirituality. In its place, she revived flesh within the word, and she privileged the body of drives and passions within the imagery and symbolism that weave patients’ fantasies together.

 Among all tributes to the genius of Christianity that have accompanied the advent of its third millennium, one tribute has been ignored: by situating itself in the space in which the Word is turned into flesh, and vice versa, the Christian experience has embarked on a journey to the end of night in which words and things become one. Is this a mystery of the unintelligible or rather an acknowledgment of psychosis? Because Christianity was established on the frontier between the two—a frontier that it subsequently reflected upon—it can lay claim to a certain universalism and can subsume the other religions. Psychoanalysis may well be the only thing that acknowledges this challenge to Christianity, for psychoanalysis is based on model of the psychic apparatus that incorporates sexuality and acts through transference love.

What is known as Freud’s “Copernican” revolution does not reside solely in the wound that Freud struck at the heart of man God by ousting our mastery of consciousness through the unconscious logic of desire. Even more radically, psychoanalysis seeks to inscribe language and through in the sexual drive, including in its biological substratum. The Kleinian phantasy hastens this recasting of the dualism between body and-soul. By positing that flash-and-soul are forever linked in the heart of the human being, psychoanalysis surpasses its strictly clinical and sometimes excessively ideological strains. Even if it is difficult for us to admit, psychoanalysis partakes in an indispensable strain of modern thought that has endeavored, for more than a century, to effect a gradual and yet audacious dismantling of metaphysics, beginning with its dichotomous categories (body and soul, subject and object, space and time, and the like). From that perspective, the way Klein listens to the fantasy and then interprets it appears to reflect this deconstruction of metaphysics that is of particular interest to the post-Catholic debate between psychoanalysis and metaphysics. We still must acknowledge, however, that the myth of Christian incarnation has already attempted to reorganize metaphysical dualism: the body of the Man of Sorrow is a soul, and the soul is a body in the dynamic of transubstantiation. By rendering Freud radical, Klein relies on all of her therapeutic sense to transform this myth and its deconstruction into care and respect for the other. The fantasy seems indeed to be both the object (the patient’s fantasy) and the Archimedean point (the analyst’s fantasy) of this experience.

Despite these formal psychoanalytic and philosophical advances, however, we still have a long way to go before we can describe how the analyst’s verbalized fantasy, which is shared through transference and countertransference, encourages the subsequent modification that transforms the prenarrative envelope into a named and playful fantasy. Through the narrative recounted by the child, it also frees up the internal logic of narration—as well as the internal logic of nonnarrative, scientific, and theoretical manifestations.