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As we all know, reality and fantasy cannot always be separated: each affects the other, often in very powerful ways. There is, of course, much that can be said about reality, but the main emphasis of this paper will be on the adaptive role of a particular sort of unconscious fantasy. I have referred to this in the title of my paper as ‘the stabilizing function of unconscious fantasy’. By adaptation in this context I refer to the intrapsychic adaptation that occurs in response to all sorts of forces operating on the individual: the forces from the external world which impinge on the person in particular ways, as well as forces from the inside, impulses of various sorts, arising from a variety of sources. These include drive impulses, but the drives form only one aspect of the motivating factors to which I shall be referring. It will be evident, I believe, that a part of what I shall have to say has to do, directly or indirectly, with the topic of motivation.
Let me begin with a reference to an aspect of the adaptive function of conscious daydreaming. It is almost fifty years since Anna Freud wrote The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, in which she introduced, among many other ideas, the clinically important notion, which we all take for granted nowadays, of denial in fantasy. This mechanism, she could show, is used by the child to deny or reverse the painful reality of his relative powerlessness when he compares himself with adults. The motive for this reversal is predominantly narcissistic—the daydream aims to restore the child's lowered self-esteem-and in spelling this out Anna Freud anticipated much of the relatively recent work on disturbances of narcissism. She described, for instance, a seven-year-old boy who fantasied that he owned a tame lion which loved him, but which terrified everyone else. He elaborated his conscious daydreams about this in many different ways, and in analysis it could be seen that the lion had come to represent the father, who was a riva