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This book, edited by Paula Ellman and Nancy Goodman, begins with the statement “Psychoanalysis views unconscious fantasy as foundational in the understanding of psychic realities” (p. 1). The editors’ intent is to discover how symbolization occurs through the finding of unconscious fantasy, and to mend the long-standing conceptual split between trauma and fantasy. As is known, severe trauma has the effect of splitting off traumatic memories and shutting down the process of fantasizing and symbolizing. The focus here is on how unconscious fantasy becomes known and articulated in the clinical psychoanalytic setting. More specifically, Ellman and Goodman have asked psychoanalysts with diverse theoretical backgrounds to present cases marked by trauma and somatic pain to demonstrate their ways of discovering and understanding unconscious fantasies in the clinical material.
Ellman and Goodman provide a very brief outline of the major conceptualizations of unconscious fantasy by Freud, Melanie Klein, and Jacob Arlow. (Kleinians use the British spelling phantasy rather than fantasy. I have tried to follow the usage of each contributor.) Freud introduced the idea in his understanding of hysterical symptoms as expressing repressed scenes of seduction involving forbidden wishes. Later he introduced the idea of inborn fantasies such as the primal scene. Klein and Susan Isaacs posit that all mental processes and structures are composed of unconscious phantasies. For Isaacs phantasy is the mental corollary of Freud's instincts. Arlow describes a continuing stream of fantasies throughout life in terms of individual or collective myths. Intersubjective analysts find unconscious fantasy where it is unformulated or in need of