T.A. Victor, M.L. Furey, S.J. Fromm, A. Ohman, & W.C. Drevets (2010). Relationship between amygdala responses to masked faces and mood state and treatment in major depressive disorder.  Archives of General Psychiatry  67: 1128-1138.

First elaborated by Freud in the late 1890s, the concept of unconscious fantasy has been a central element of psychoanalytic theories of pathogenesis and therapeutic action ever since. These unconscious wishes, fears, memories of early experiences, and scripts for interaction with significant others are postulated to organize the data of perception and to influence an individual's conscious experience and behavior. Until recently, clinical data have been the sole means of obtaining information about unconscious fantasies: dreams, symptoms, slips of the tongue, and repetitive or hoped-for object relations. Similarly, psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic treatment has been the primary means of uncovering pathological unconscious fantasies and remedying their maladaptive effects on a person's life. As has occurred with other psychoanalytic constructs described in Journal Watch, neuroscience has begun to help us understand the biological underpinnings of unconscious fantasy.

It has long been known that depressed individuals exhibit a “mood-congruent negative processing bias,” which is to say they preferentially attend to, predict, and recall negatively valenced stimuli—the glass is always half empty. The amygdala has been hypothesized to play a key role in mediating this processing bias, as experiments have shown that depressed patients have amygdala hyperactivation (relative to controls) in response