You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper is a report of the study of the phantasies produced by 50 patients in a psychiatric clinic. Many types of mental disease were among them. Pictures used by Morgan and Murray for phantasy production were shown to the patients for their associations. It was found that the stories told by the patients denoted in disguised symbolic form the desires, repressions and conflicts of the patient, and offered valuable leads to the psychodynamisms of the subject's neurosis. The histories of three patients are given and samples of their phantasy material with interpretations.
Apart from the psycho-analytic interpretation of the content of the phantasies in terms of unconscious mental dynamisms, phantasy studies may be of value in determining the state of the transference. This may be shown in attitudes to people in authority, in the phantasy and in the amount of production: i.e. profuse or sterile and brief. The test may further be an aid in getting the history; and it may bring into sharp relief salient psychological features of the case, such as the sources of indecisiveness, guilt or anxiety in a given case. The phantasies may also be used as an aid in psychiatric diagnosis; thus conversion hysterics, anxiety neurotics, depressives, etc., tend to have characteristically different types of phantasies. And, finally, the test may be used to indicate advisable directions in which to attempt psychiatric therapy and the nature of the prognosis.