Symposium on Fantasy—Fantasy and Other Mental Processes1

My presentation will, of necessity, be rather abstract and schematic, as I wish, in the space allowed, to cover some well-known material and some that I hope is new. I shall be concerned with the relation between the function of fantasy and other mental phenomena, namely instincts, mental mechanism, structure and higher mental processes like thinking. Susan Isaacs, in her paper 'The Nature and Function of Phantasy', elaborates the relation between unconscious fantasy and instincts and mental mechanisms. She states that fantasy may be considered the psychic representative or the mental correlate, the mental expression of instincts. James Strachey, in his editorial notes to Freud's paper 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes', draws attention to the fact that Freud wavers between two definitions of instincts. In some papers he describes the instinct as 'a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, … the psychical representative of the stimuli originating within the organism and reaching the mind', or, in another paper, 'the concept on the frontier between the somatic and the mental …, the psychical representative of organic forces'. Strachey says: 'These accounts seem to make it plain that Freud was drawing no distinction between the instinct and its 'psychical representative'. He was apparently regarding the instinct itself as the psychical representative of somatic forces. If now, however, we turn to later papers in the series, we seem to find him drawing a very sharp distinction between the instinct and its psychical representative.' And Strachey goes on to give several references, for instance quoting from the paper on 'The Unconscious': 'An instinct can never become an object of consciousness—only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea.'

It seems to me that Isaacs' way of using the concept of fantasy bridges the gap be