One of Freud’s earliest discoveries was that in the unconscious, memories and phanttasies are not distinguished—hence his abandonment of or “affect trauma” theory. From that time onwards phantasies have been of central interest. In this paper I discuss the ideas of Freud and Klein’s ideas about phantasy I refer briefly to the Controversial Discussions of the British Psychoanalytical Society in the nineteen forties, in which the concept of phantasy played a central role (King &Steiner, 1991). I then describe certain more recent but minor changes in the Kleinian use of the concept. The paper concludes with brief conjectures about the use of the concept in other current schools of psychoanalysis.

     Considering its importance, it is perhaps surprising that Freud did not devote even a paper to the concept of phantasy, let alone a book. His ideas on it are scattered about in the first twenty years of his psychoanalytic writings. His most explicit theoretical statements about it are to be found in his paper “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning” in 1911 and in Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (1916). In her work with children Klein gradually developed a rather different view from that of Freud. Klein’s view was explicitly stated by Susan Isaacs in “The nature and

function of phantasy” (1952) and was the central theoretical issue of the Controversial Discussions in the British Psycho-Analytical Society in 1943 (King & Steiner, 1991). The various views on phantasy voiced at the Discussions are clearly described and discussed by Anne Hayman (1989).

     One of the difficulties in expounding the differences between Freud uses the term rather differently in different places. In “Formulaions on the two principles of mental functioning,” which is where he comes closest to making a formal definition, he speaks of phantasy as a wish-fulfilling activity that can arise when an instinctual wish is frustrated. Phantasies derive ultimately form unconscious impulses, the basic instincts of sex and aggression. I shall call this Freud’s central usage. (It is well expounded by Sandler& Nagera, 1963.)

     In understanding Freud’s central usage it is important to remember that his idea of phantasy, like his work on dreams, is closely bound up with the development of his topographical model of the mind (Freud, 1900, Chapter 7, 1915a,b; Sandler et al., 1997). In the topographical model of the mind, conceptualised as the system unconscious, the system preconscious, and the system conscious, there is a double focus, first on the attributes of

consciousness and unconsciousness, and second on primary and secondary process. The secondary process Freud defined as the rational thinking of ordinary logic; the “primary process” he thought of as a much more peculiar system of logic, characteristic of the system unconscious, in which opposites are equated, there is no sense of time, no negation, no conflict.

     Although Freud thought that some unconscious phantasies might be “unconscious all along,” he thought that most phantasies originated as conscious or preconscious daydreams and might subsequently be repressed. As he puts it in “Hysterical phantasies and their relaion to bisexuality,” the unconscious phantasies of hysterics “have either been unconscious all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious phantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through “repression” (1908, p. 160). In Freud’s view the basic motive force for phantasy formation is an unconscious wish that is blocked from fulfillment, and the phantasy is a disguised expression and partial fulfillment of this unconscious wish. If phantasies are formed in the system conscious or if they are allowed into it—that is, if they are daydreams—they are known not to be true. If they are formed in the system preconscious or if they are repressed into

it, they will be descriptively unconscious

but formed according to the everyday logic of the secondary process. If phantasies are further repressed into the system unconscious, they become subject to the peculiar logic of the primary process and from their position in the system unconscious they may become indistinguishable from memories and may also find their way into dreams, symptoms, symptomatic acts, further preconscious and conscious phantasies, and other drive derivatives.

     Freud’s “central usage,” with its emphasis on phantasies being formed according to the logical thinking of the secondary process, is the usage that was adopted by Anna Freud and the other Vienneses analysts during the Controversial Discussions, and by several British analysts, notably Marjorie Brierley and to some extent by Ella Freeman Sharpe and Sylvia Payne (King & Steiner, 1991). This is the usage that has been adopted by ego-psychologists (Beres, 1962; Arlow, 1969a,b, 1995; Inderbitzin &Levy, 1990), by the Contemporary Freudian group of analysts in Britain (especially Sandler, 1986; Sandler & Sandler, 1986, 1994, 1995) and also by many Independent analysts.

     In Freud’s view, although there are phantasies in the system unconscious, the basic unit of the system unconscious is not phantasy but the unconscious instinctual wish. Dream-formation and phantasy-formation are parallel processes; one might speak of “phantasy

work” as comparable to the “dream

work;” both involve transformation of primary unconscious content into a disguised form. For Klein, on the contrary, unconscious phantasies are the primary unconscious content, and dreams are a transformation of it. For Freud, the prime mover, so to speak, is the unconscious wish; dreams and phantasies are both disguised derivatives of it. For Klein the prime mover is unconscious phantasy.

     I think that Freud and Klein emphasised contrasting aspects of the everyday usage of the word phantasy. The word conveys contrasting implications both in English and I believe also in German. It has a connotation of the imagination and creativity that underlie all thought and feeling, but it also has a connotation of make-believe, a daydream, something that is untrue by the standards of material reality (see Rycroft, 1968, p. 118; Laplanche & Pontalis 1973; R. Steiner, 1988; Britton, 1995). Freud’s central usage emphasises the fictitious, wish-fulfilling aspect of the everyday usage, whereas Klein’s usage tends to focus on the imaginative aspect.

     But this relatively clear-cut contrast between Freud and Klein is complicated by the fact Freud’s “central usage” is not by any means his only usage. Further, he moves easily from one implied definition to another without being finicky about his formulations. In some of his early work he seems at times almost to equate unconscious phantasy

these are the phantasies of the primal scene, of castration, of seduction by an adult. He does not mean, he makes clear, that parental intercourse is never seen, that threats of castration do not occur, or that seduction does not happen in reality. But he thinks that these phantasies will occur even if external reality does not support them because they were once, to quote him, “real occurrences in the primeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth” (1916, p. 371). Most of Freud’s followers have not adopted this view, presumably because they think it too Lamarckian. But with some alteration I think it is not far away form Klein’s notion of inherent knowledge of bodily organs, birth and intercourse (1927, pp 175-6), or from Bion’s idea of “preconceptions” waiting to combine with experience to form conceptions (1962a, b). In French psychoanalysis these primal phantasies are considered to be of fundamental significance both in theory and in clinical work (Roussillon, 1998).

     In summary, Freud is not punctilious in his definition of phantasy. He uses the term in several senses and, as Laplanche & Pontalis point out, he is more concerned with the transformation of one ort of phantasy into one another than with any static definition (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973, pp. 314-19). What I have called his “central usage,” however, is that one that has

with unconscious wish (1900, p. 574); at others he speaks of phantasies largely as conscious or preconscious day-dream (1900, pp. 491-8). In his clinical work he deduces phantasies of quite surprising content, phantasies of which the patient has presumably been unaware. He assumes, for example, that the Wolf Man when he was 11/2 years old had a phantasy of being inside his mother’s womb so as to intercept his father’s penis (1918, pp. 101-3). It is not clear whether Freud thought the Wolf Man was consciously aware of this phantasy at the time and repressed it later, or whether it never became conscious at all. Freud deduces similarly striking phantasies in the case of Dora (1905), though he does not discuss their precise topographical status. Some of Dora’s phantasies were presumably conscious, such as her phantasy of revenge on her father. Some were probably at least descriptively unconscious, such as her phantasy of fellatio, of the female genital (the “nymphs” in the “thick wood;” that is, the labia minora in the pubic hair), her phantasy of defloration, of bearing Herr K’s child, and her homosexual love for Frau K.

     It seems likely that Freud always tacitly assumed that at least some phantasies may originate directly in the system unconscious without being originally preconscious or conscious derivatives of unconscious wishes. Indeed in 1916 he speaks of primal phantasies, which he thinks are inherited;

been adopted by most of his immediate followers.

     What, then, is Klein’s view of unconscious phantasy? And why did it arouse so much controversy?

     Basically, Klein focuses on the “unconscious all along” aspect of phantasy. as a basic metal activity present in rudimentary form from birth onwards and essential for mental growth, though it can also be used defensively. Klein developed this view of phantasy through her work with children, especially through discovering that children accompanied all their activities by a constant stream of phantasy even when they were not being frustrated by external reality. One of many examples is Fritz and the letters of the alphabet:

For in his phantasies the lines in his exercise book were roads, the book itself was the whole world and the letters rode into it on motor bicycles, i.e. on the pen. Again, the pen was a boat and the exercise book a lake…In general he regarded the small letters as the children of the capital letters. The capital S he looked upon as the emperor of the long German s’s; it had two hooks at the end of it to distinguish it from the empress, the terminal s, which had only one hook (1923, p. 100).

     Klein developed her idea of phantasy gradually from 1919 onwards, stressing particularly: the damaging effect of inhibition of phantasy in the development of the child; the ubiquity of phantasies about the mother’s body and

its contents; the variety of phantasies about the primal scene and the Oedipus complex; the intensity of both aggressive and loving phantasies; the combination of several phantasies to form what she called the depressive position (Klein, 1935, 1940)—the paranoid-schizoid position was to come later, in 1946—the development of phantasies of internal objects and, of course, the expression of all theses phantasies in the play of children and the thinking and behaviour of adults. Essentially, I think that Klein viewed unconscious phantasy as synonymous with unconscious thought and feeling, and that she may have used the term phantasy rather than thought because the thoughts of her child patients were more imaginative and less rational than ordinary adult thought is supposed to be. Further, Klein thought that it was possible to deduce the phantasies of infants from her analyses of small children, assuming that she was discovering the infant in the child much as Freud had discovered the child in the adult (Britton, 1995).

     So important was the concept of phantasy in Klein’s thinking that the British Society made it the central scientific topic of the Controversial Discussions of the nineteen forties (King & Steiner, 1991), the aim of the discussions being to see whether Klein’s

ideas were to be regarded as heresy or development. It was Susan Isaacs, however, who gave the definitive paper, “The nature and function of phantasy,”

first given in the Discussions, then published in revised form in 1948 and 1952. In this paper Isaacs stressed the link between Klein’s concept of phantasy and Freud’s concept of drive. She defined phantasy as “the primary content of unconscious mental processes,” “the mental corollary, the psychic representative, of instinct” (1952). Phantaies are the equivalent of what Freud meant by the “instinctual representative” or the “psychic representative of an instinctual drive.”

     Isaacs, like Klein, particularly emphasizes the idea that everyone has a continual stream of unconscious phantasy, and, further, that abnormality or normality rests not on the presence or absence of unconscious phantasy but on how it is expressed, modified and related to external reality. She distinguishes between conscious and unconscious phantasy and suggests the ph spelling to distinguish the latter.

     Isaacs’s and Klein’s definition of phantasy is thus much wider than Freud’s central usage. In the Kleinian view, unconscious phantasy is the mainspring, the original and essential content of the unconscious mind. It includes very early forms of infantile thought, but it also includes other forms that emerge later on in development through change in the original phantasies. Also, as described by Freud, some unconscious phantasies may start off as conscious daydreams or theories that are later repressed. But, unlike many of Freud’s successors, Klein

does not think that repression of once conscious daydreams is the only or even the main source of unconscious phantasies. Freud’s central usage, the wish-fulfilling definition of phantasy, is a specific and more limited form, a particular type of phantasy within Klein’s more inclusive definition. In the Controversial Discussions Klein and Isaacs did not stress this relation between their all-inclusive definition and the wish-fulfilling definition of phantasy as a particular type within it. Certainly the argument in the Discussions was made more difficult by the fact that each faction was using the same word for a different concept; much of the time the two factions talked past each other. Sometimes the Viennese seemed to assume that Klein’s definition of phantasy was the same as their own, so that they could not understand how Klein could possibly say that phantasies occurred in very early infantile life, since this would have meant that very small infants were capable of secondary-process thinking. At other times Glover and Anna Freud specifically criticized Klein for broadening the concept of phantasy so much that it included everything and hence had become meaningless (King & Steiner, 1991, p. 399, pp. 423-4). Ronald Britton (1998) has suggested that Isaacs probably did not fully clarify the difference in definitions because she did not want to emphasise Klein’s difference from Freud, for Klein and her colleagues

with the sensation and may have an effect on it; looked at from the perspective of an outside observer, the “something” is some aspect of external reality. From the perspective of the infant, things are assumed to be inside him. Hinshelwwod describes it as follows:

An unconscious phantasy is a belief in the activity of concretely felt “internal” objects. This is a difficult concept to grasp. A somatic sensation tugs along with it a mental experience that is interpreted as a relationship with an object that wishes to cause that sensation, and is loved or hated by the subject according to whether the objects is well-meaning or has evil intentions (i.e. a pleasant or unpleasant sensation). Thus an unpleasant sensation I mentally represented as a relationship with a “bad” object that intends to hurt and damage the subject… Conversely, when he is fed, the infant’s experience is of an object, which we can identify as mother, or her milk, but

which the infant identifies as an object in his tummy benevolently motivated to cause pleasant sensations there (1989, pp. 34-5).

     Through introjection and projection a complex phantasy world of self and internal objects is slowly built up, some of it conscious, but reaching to the unconscious depths. This notion of internal objects and the internal world was and has continued to be central in Kleinian thought. This internal world is imaginary by the standards of material reality, but possesses what Freud calls “psychic” reality—that is, to the

were worried that Glover might succeed in banishing them from the Society on the grounds that they differed from Freud and were therefore not “legitimate.”

     Freud is not very specific in making conjectures about the nature of early infantile thought. Klein called such thought phantasy and assumed that it was closely linked to bodily experience. She assumes that phantasising starts very early, in some primitive form “from the beginning,” as she was fond of saying. She did not bother much about Freud’s distinction between the system unconscious and the system preconscious, between primary-and secondary-process thinking. Klein and Isaacs assumed that phantasies could be formed according to primary-process thinking—indeed, that primary-and secondary-process thinking were very much intertwined.

     Isaacs assumes that the earliest phantasies are experienced mainly as visceral sensations and urges, the other senses of touch, smell, sound, taste and sight being added later and gradually. Such unconscious phantasies can perhaps be regarded as similar to the “thing presentations” that Freud describes in “The unconscious” (195b). Isaacs makes much use of the principle of genetic continuity to link these very early phantasies with the more structured verbal phantasies of the older child and the adult. She assumes that what is experienced is a sensation and an impulse, together with a feeling of something happening that is involved

individual concerned it feels real at some level, conscious or unconscious, and it is also real in the sense that it affects his behaviour. It is noteworthy too that in the unconscious aspects of the internal world Klein and Isaacs think of phantasies as combining both ideas and feeling—another difference from Freud, who spoke of the system unconscious as the realm of ideas and memory traces and was never entirely resolved about the status of unconscious feelings.

     Early phantasies are omnipotent: “I want it, I’ve got it.” “I don’t want it, it’s gone!” They are stated by Isaacs to have many attributes Freud thought to be characteristic of the primary process—no co-ordination of impulses, no sense of time, no contradiction, no negation. But Klein also thought of unconscious impulses and phantasies being in conflict with each other in the unconscious; unconscious conflict between love and hate, between a good self and a bad self, between a good parent and a bad parent were conceptions she found appropriate and useful, though in Freud’s topographical conceptualization wishes (and wishful phantasies) in the system unconscious are in conflict not directly with each other but indirectly through their contact with the regulating ego.

     Klein’s discoveries about the phantasies of small children led her to be very aware of their intense bodily concreteness, their concern with birth, death, the primal scene, babies, faeces, urine, murderous hatred and equally

Violent love. Her descriptions of phantasies are as graphic and surprising as those of Freud. For example:

One day while Ruth was once again devoting her attention exclusively to her sister, she drew a picture of a tumbler with some small round balls inside and a kind of lid on top. I asked hr what the lid was for, but she would not answer me. On her sister repeating the question, she said it was “to prevent the balls from rolling out.” Before this, she had gone through her sister’s bag and then shut it tightly “so that nothing should fall out of it.” She had done the same with the purse inside the bag so as to keep the coins safely shut up…I now made a venture and told Ruth that the balls in the tumbler, the coins in the purse and the contents of the bag all meant children in her Mummy’s inside, and that she wanted to keep them safely shut up so as not to have any more brothers and sisters. The effect of my interpretation was astonishing. For the first time Ruth turned her attention to me and began to play in a different, less constrained way (Klein, 1932, pp. 26-7).

    Or again:

As I was putting a wet sponge beside one of them [a doll] as she had done, she burst out crying again and screamed, “No, she mustn’t have the big sponge, that’s not for children, that’s for grown ups!” I may remark that in her two previous sessions she had brought up a lot of material concerning her envy of her mother. I now interpreted this material in connection with her protest against the big sponge, which represented her father’s penis. I showed her in

every detail how she envied and hated her mother because the latter had incorporated her father’s penis during coitus, and how she wanted to seal his penis and the children out of her mother’s inside and kill her mother. I explained to her that this was why she was frightened and believed that she had killed her mother or would be deserted by her…Gradually she sat up and watched the course of the play with growing interest and even began to take an active part in it herself…[When] the nurse came…she was surprised to find her happy and cheerful and to see her say goodbye to me in a friendly and even affectionate way (p. 28).

     Nowadays, like our classical colleagues, many Kleinian analysts have become more cautious about interpreting phantasies so boldly and so concretely (see Spillius, 1988, pp. 8-9, 1994). In spite of this change, I think that emphasis on the unconscious and on adult forms of living out infantile experiences and phantasies has remained characteristic of Kleinian analysis. Like Klein herself, her present-day followers take it for granted that in thinking, in dreaming, in creativity, in all experiencing there is a constant and often uncomfortable mixture of logic and illogic. Further, unconscious phantasy is the mainspring of both creativity and destructiveness. It gives meaning to the external world and richness to the internal world.

     Klein and Isaacs assume that the expression of unconscious phantasy in words comes very much later than their original sensory formulation. Indeed, in current Kleinian thought it is assumed