that some unconscious phantasies about infantile experience are never formally articulated in words, though words may be the means unconsciously used to communicate them by evoking them in an external person. To give an example: in the course of a preliminary consultation an articulate young woman suddenly said, “Hollow inside,” and then continued with what she had been saying. At a suitable pause I asked, “Did you say “Hollow inside?” She asked what I meant, adding that she had no memory of having said anything about “hollow inside.” I felt rather disorientated. Once her sessions began she talked intelligently and apparently meaningfully about her history and her current life, but I felt detached and unable to find any real meaning or emotional connection with what she was saying. Eventually it occurred to me that now I was experiencing the “hollow inside” that she had so accurately and so disconcertingly put into words. Gradually this split-off experience became the focus of our sessions.

     Klein and Isaacs assume that phantasies affect the perception of external reality, but, equally, that external reality affects phantasies, that there is a continual interplay between them. This assumption—namely, that actual external events are interpreted and understood, experienced in other words, in terms of pre-existing phantasies, and that phantasies may be modified to take experience of events into account is a

basic premise in Kleinian thought. It comes, for example, into the Kleinian idea that the infant gradually develops the more realistic thinking of the depressive poison (Klein, 1935, 1940; Segal, 1964) alongside and partially replacing the omnipotentt thinking of the paranoid-schizoid position (Klein, 1946), although each infant and each adult will have their own characteristic realization of the two form of thought in the particular content of their phantasies.

     Phantasies expressing particular impulses and defences do not operate in isolation. Gradually some of them may build up into a complex system that involves the individual’s own unique way of being, of relating to the world, of maintaining his balance. The concept of phantasy is thus central to the idea of the organization of the personality as a whole. This is the main sense of the term “unconscious fantasy” favoured by Arlow (1969a, b, 1995), by Shane &Shane as global fantasies (1990) and by Inderbitzin & Levy (1990). Kleinian usage includes such central or “global” phantasies but does not confine the general term to such particular sorts of phantasy.

     THE FATE OF THE CONCEPT OF PHANTASY AFTER THE CONTROVERSIAL DISCUSIONS

     It is hardly surprising that in the Controversial Discussions of the nineteen

Forties Anna Freud, Glover and their associates were not convinced by Isaacs’s arguments, nor she by theirs. As I have said, they meant such different things by the same term, phantasy, that they were talking past each other. Since 1943 the differences of definition and usage have continued, though most of the heat has gone out of this particular debate.

Later Kleinian developments

     Kleinians’ changes in their definition and use of the concept of phantasy have been minimal. Considering that Kleinians regard unconscious phantasy as such an important concept, it is perhaps surprising that little has been written about it since Isaacs’ original paper. (But see Segal 1964; Joseph 1981; Hinshelwood, 1989; Britton, 1995.) I think so little has been written because the concept is now taken for granted. Many of the developments in Kleinian thought have used the concept of phantasy without changing Klein’s view of it. Much of the work on the development of thinking, for example, uses the idea of changes in the content and functions of phantasy in the movement form the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, as I have briefly described above. Bion takes the concept of phantasy for granted in describing the model of the container and the contained and its role in the development of

thinking (1962b). Similarly, much of the work on psychic equilibrium and on pathological organizations uses the concept of phantasy, especially in the course of describing the relevant clinical material (Riviere, 1936; Rosenfeld, 1971; Segal, 197; O’Shaughnessy, 1981; Joseph, 1982; J. Steiner, 1993). Phantasy comes into everything.

     Although Klein’s successors have thus made little fundamental change in her concept of phantasy, they have in my view made three minor changes: more emphasis on the role of phantasy, they have in my view made three minor changes: more emphasis on the role of phantasy in the development of logical thought; a change in the language used to describe unconscious phantasies to the patient; and more emphasis on the enactment of phantasies by the patient in the analytic situation.

     First, phantasies are now viewed by Kleinians as crucially important in the development of logical thought since they may be used as hypotheses to be confirmed or disproved by experiences of external reality, and idea implicit in Klein’s thought but explicitly added to the Kleinian conception of phantasy by Hanna Segal (1964, 1994). The testing of phantasies against reality does not mean that earlier more omnipotent phantasies are necessarily abandoned; they remain but are added to by more sophisticated versions in keeping with experiences of external reality. Also, often the more sophisticated versions are used to deny

the continuing psychic reality of the cruder and perhaps earlier phantasies (Segal, 1994; Britton, 1995).

     Second, as I have briefly mentioned above, many Kleinians have become more cautious about using part-object anatomical language in describing to certain patients the content of unconscious phantasies (Spillius, 1988, 1994).

     Third, in describing clinical material there has been a tendency to devote attention not only to the symbolic content of phantasies but also, and increasingly, to the way they are lived out in the session. This has been a notable trend in the highly influential work of Betty Joseph (1989). I shall now give an example of the enactment of an unconscious phantasy.

     My patient, Mrs B, aged 50, had had several separations in early and middle childhood. She remembered them, especially the later ones, as painful and distressing but accepted them as an inevitable part of her family’s way of life. Consciously she felt considerable respect and admiration for her parents. Analytic breaks were not easy for her, but my attempts to link them with her childhood separations had not seemed particularly meaningful to her. Another feature that had emerged slowly in her analysis was a cruel streak that seemed quite alien and split off from her general character.

      For two or three weeks before a particular analytic break, which Mrs B

Planned to extend by going away for an additional few days herself, she became fed up, critical of herself, her analysis and particularly of me. Gradually I became filled with more self-doubt than usual about my ability as an analyst.

     In the particular session I shall describe, Mrs B came about then minutes late and was silent for a long time. Eventually, on the basis of the quality of the silence, I said she gave the impression of feeling very negative and angry. Again there was a long silence. At the end she launched into a description of a lot of inconveniences and minor grievances, mainly at work. She said it was a peculiar twist that analysis stirs things up in such a way that all these minor complaints turn into an attack here. I said she wanted me to regard them as minor complaints but…

     “No,” she said, “only to know the difference between major and minor.” (There was utter contempt in her voice.) There was a short silence, then she said, “I don’t know whether it’s you or me, but in the past ten days it seems to my you just totally and utterly keep missing the point.” (Her tone was exceedingly scathing.) “”Yesterday you apparently didn’t notice it was so painful for me to admit that I find analysis and everything you do so terribly uninteresting. I can’t stand it.”

     I waited a bit, then started to speak, but she broke in, “Don’t talk!” (almost screaming). “You’re just going to repeat what I said, or you’re going to alter it. You don’t take things in, you don’t listen

to what I say, or you listen and you just want to hear it the way you want it to be and you distort it.” I was finding it hard to think, and I knew that my own self-doubt was getting even more powerfully stirred up by her accusations. But I managed one small thought, which was that she must be feeling inadequate too, and that my leaving had a lot to do with it. Then came a second thought, that she hates herself for being cruel even though she gets excited by it.

     I said she couldn’t bear for me to know how painfully attacking she was, how much she wanted to hurt me, how cruel she felt; but she also couldn’t stand it if I didn’t know, didn’t react. It meant she was unimportant.

     “Can’t you realize,” she screamed, “that I am totally and utterly uninterested in you! I don’t care! I only care about myself. Take your pain to your analyst. Well, it’s not my fault if you haven’t got one.”

     What I said, after quite a long pause, was that I thought she felt I treated her cruelly, with complete scorn and indifference, as if she was boring and utterly uninteresting, and that was why I was leaving her. She felt that the only way she could really get this through to me was to make me suffer in the same way.

     There was another long silence. Then she said, “None of this alters my being tired and having too many things to do.” (She sounded like a slightly mollified but still petulant child.) “I

suppose,” she went on, “I am in a childish rage with you I never could attack my parents, so I have to make up for it now.” This, although probably true, led to something of a detour, and the session ended more or less amicably but with many loose ends.

     In later sessions it became clearer that Mrs B had an unconscious phantasy in which she thought her parents had cruelly left her in those childhood separations because she was stupid and unlovable. In the session I have described she lived this out: I was the stupid child and she the cruel parent. I believe that she had sensed my self-doubt and that unconsciously she exploited this to get me to play her role as the stupid child in a cruel scene of abandonment. Once this unconscious phantasy and its enactment had been clarified, Mrs B felt a much deeper and more forgiving understanding of this aspect of herself and of her parents.

     A final word about the Kleinian view of unconscious phantasy. It is clear that in the Kleinian view, unconscious phantasy is really synonymous with the content of the unconscious mind. That was one of the objections that Glover, Anna Freud and others made to Klein’s usage: all mental functions were encapsulated into this one concept. Of course it is clear that all analysts, regardless of school of thought and regardless of their definition of the concept of phantasy, use the idea of unconscious thoughts and feelings. In

Kleinian analysis such thoughts and feelings are called unconscious phantasy; in classical analysis they are called drive derivatives, and the term phantasy is used only for one particular form of drive derivative. But the conception of unconscious thoughts and feelings occurs in all schools of analysis. Perhaps the importance of the Kleinian notion of unconscious phantasy, overall, is that it has tended to keep the attention of Kleinian analysts even more focused on unconscious anxieties and defences than is the case in other schools of psychoanalytic thought.

Later Independent views on phantasy

     The concept of phantasy has not been central in the thinking of psychoanalysts of the Independent group, but Harold Stewart thinks that Independent analysts have made an important contribution to it by stressing the particular importance of actual external experiences in contributing to patients’ phantasies (Stewart, 1992, also personal communication). This is in keeping with the general Independent stress on the importance of actual external events in shaping the internal world.

Later Contemporary Freudian views

     Contemporary Freudians, as described above, use Freud’s central definition of phantasy. Joseph Sandler

has been especially interested in the definition and use of the concept of phantasy (Sandler, 1986; Sandler & Nagera, 1963). He and his wife, Anne-Marie Sandler, have constructed a model of the mind involving what they call the past unconscious and the present unconscious (Sandler, 1983; Sandler & Sandler, 1984, 1986, 987, and particularly 1994, 1995), which corresponds roughly to Freud’s System Ucs. And System Pcs. of the topographical model, in which the concept of unconscious phantasy is most at home.

Phantasy in Continental and especially French psychoanalysis

     The idea of unconscious phantasy is particularly important in French psychoanalysis, especially the primal phantasies of the primal scene, seduction, castration and also the Oedipus complex. This emphasis on unconscious phantasy ahs not occurred because of British or Kleinian influence but because of interest in Freud, especially perhaps the earlier Freud of the topographical model.

Phantasy in American psychoanalysis

     It is my impression, though there are many exceptions to this (especially Jacob Arlow), that less attention is paid to manifestations of unconscious phantasy or of the unconscious in general in American psychoanalysis than in British and Continental analysis. The American

Psychoanalytical Association held a panel on unconscious phantasy (Inderbitzin & Shapiro, 1989), with papers by Shapiro (1990), Trosman, (1990) Abend (1990), Shane & Shane (1990), Dowling (1990) and Inderbitain & Levy (1990). This was the first panel on the topic for many years and in it Shapiro (1990) specifically remarked that the concept of phantasy had been neglected. I think that such neglect is perhaps encouraged by the structural model of id/ego/sugerego, which focuses attention on conflict between these three conceptualized agencies of the mind and on the defences and adaptations of the ego. The two distinctions of conscious/unconscious and primary/secondary process, which cut across each other and which are so important in Freud’s characterizing of different types of phantasy, also cut across the id/ego/superego classification, which does not provide a natural “home” for unconscious phantasy. Of course the concept of unconscious phantasy is clinically useful, essential even, and talented clinicians have found ways of focusing attention on it even though the structural model tends to discourage focus on the dynamic unconscious.

     Although yet again there are exceptions (e.g. Shane & Shane, 1990) it seems to me that decreasing focus on unconscious phantasy is even more apparent among self-psychologists, intersubjectivists and relational analysts than among other sorts of American

psychoanalyst. Presumably this decreased emphasis on the unconscious of the analysand occurs because it if felt that the interpersonal perspective on both the analytic relationship and the analysand’s personal history offers a more cogent understanding of personality, normal as well as pathological, than do the concepts of unconscious phantasy and, more generally, of conflict between conscious and unconscious. I do not see any logical reason why the interpersonal focus should necessarily tend to exclude the unconscious, but empirically it does seem to be so.

SUMMARY

     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 fulfillment. For Freud himself, especially in his central usage, and even more for his immediate followers, phantasies are conceived as imagined fulfillments 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 he 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 ahs continued to be used by her successors with only minor changes. In Klein’s thinking unconscious phantasies play the part that Freud assigned to the unconscious wish. They underlie dreams rather than being parallel to them—a much more inclusive definition of phantasy than Freud’s. The earliest and most deeply unconscious phantasies are bodily, and only gradually, with maturation and developing experience through introjection and projection do some of them come to take a verbal form. Freud’s central usage, the wish-fulfilling definition of phantasy, is a particular type of phantasy within Klein’s more inclusive definition. And, as in Freud’s formulation, conscious phantasies may be repressed, but in Klein’s formulation this is not the only or even the main source of unconscious phantasies. In Klein’s usage, unconscious phantasies underlie not only dreams but all thought and activity, both

creative and destructive, including the expression of internal object relations in the analytic situation.

     Finally, it is my tentative suggestion that conceptual and clinical focus on the concept of phantasy, especially unconscious phantasy, as in Britain and France, tends to involve a heightened awareness of the unconscious—hardly surprising, since unconscious phantasy is such a fundamental aspect of the unconscious. I have suggested that, although there are many individual variations, the structural model and the self-psychology, relational and intersubjectivist models tend to discourage focus on the dynamic unconscious.

     Acknowledgements: I am grateful to several colleagues for discussion and help in writing this paper, especially Dr. H. Segal, Dr R. Steiner, and Dr R. Britton.