Fantasy, Defence and the Representational World

A little while ago Pan Stem and I had a chance to discuss what each of us would present today1, and we agreed that I would say something about the history of the concept of the representational world, and about my own ideas on the developmentof mental representations in childhood. I want to do this as the first part of my paper, and then to discuss the idea of the mental manipulation of representations, particularly in relation to some of the different psychoanalytic concepts of conscious or unconscious fantasy. This will touch, of course, on something which Pan Stern's paper is concerned today.

Let me begin with a bit of history. In 1956 Anna Freud invited me to take charge of what was known as the Hampstead Index Project. Briefly, it was an attempt to provide a system of headings, based on psychoanalytic theory, which could be used to categorise and index the reported analytic material of children in analysis at the Hampstead Clinic (now the Anna Freud Centre). However, what looked like a relatively straightforward project soon ran into difficulties because the headings used proved to be ambiguous and imprecise when they were applied to actual clinical material. This obstacle to the work caused the project to take a different direction, and a research group was set up to try to clarify the psychoanalytic concepts used, to refine and to test their appropriateness by application to clinical material. The outcome was a series of papers, beginning with two on the concept of the superego, published in 1960 and 1962 (Sandler, 1960; Sandler et al, 1962). These were followed in 1962 by papers on the concept of the representational world (Sandler, 1962; Sandler & Rosenblatt, 1962), and subsequently by