Fantasy and Psychoanalytic Discourse1

Psychoanalytic discourse across theoretical, geographic and cultural boundaries has become increasingly difficult as psychoanalysis has grown internationally from its central European origins. Psychoanalytic terms have been used inconsistently, often with little regard for the problems in communication and scientific and intellectual progress such inconsistency creates. Likewise, what are usually considered alternative or competing psychoanalytic theories, often connected to geographic regions or cultures, create artificial divisions among analysts that further interfere with scientific progress. It is our view that the majority of such theories are partial theories, or shifts in emphasis, wherein all the necessary ingredients of a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory, of which we are strong advocates, are included at the periphery, as secondary themes, so-called ‘givens’ or ‘goings without sayings’, or smuggled in clinically as artfulness, tact or common sense.

The term phantasy or fantasy acquires different meanings and more or less importance or centrality, depending on where in the melange of psychoanalytic discourse one encounters it. In what follows, we will try to summarise an American ego-psychological point of view about fantasy, emphasising what we consider the major issues that underlie controversies about fantasy as conceptualised from this and other theoretical perspectives. We emphasise summarise to indicate that even within the perspective of contemporary ego-psychology, of which our work is representative, there is considerable variability, contradiction and lack of clarity about what the term fantasy refers to. In an earlier exploration of fantasy (Inderbitzin & Levy, 1990), we attempted to reconcile or at least delineate several trends in thinking about fantasy within contemporary ego-psychology structural theory, and some of our conclusions from that work will be elaborated here. We will argue that fantasy is central to all psychoanalytic work and t