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For several decades now the question of primal phantasies has, without any doubt, occupied a central place in the thinking of French-speaking psychoanalysts, who have devoted numerous studies to it. It is true that these cannot always be found in bibliographical listings under the heading ‘primal phantasies’, or even under the heading ‘phantasy’. The reference to phantasy has been and remains central to the discussions raised by the positions adopted by Melanie Klein and her successors, as well as to the controversies arising from some of Lacan's propositions. Apart from this, the careful study of Freud's texts which, for French psychoanalysts, constitutes the bedrock of all metapsychological reflection, has led many psychoanalysts to think about the following issues:
The status of phantasy, and especially of primal phantasies, in the first and second Freudian topographies;
their relations with the drive and hence with the object;
the part played by repression, thus raising the question of the status of unconscious phantasies: to what extent is one dealing with psychic formations that are unconscious from the outset and to what extent with ones that are made unconscious by the effect of repression (or other defence mechanisms such as disavowal)?
the organising role of phantasy, both during psychic ontogenesis as well as in thought processes: how are its relations with representation and the processes of symbolisation to be understood?
The origins of primal phantasies themselves and the manner in which they are inherited. The answers Freud put forward, whether it was an explantation in terms of constitution or in terms of his phylogenetic hypothesis and the prehistoric fiction on which it was based, seem hardly acceptable any longer; nowadays, reference is more often made to ‘transgenerational’ phenomena, the influence of the mother's unconscious (or of both parents), or Bion's ‘preconceptions’ and so on.
The reshaping of phantasy throughout an individual's history by the