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‘In psychoanalysis nothing is true except the exaggerations’.
Dear Editor,
In response to the paper by Bohleber et al. entitled ‘Unconscious phantasy and its conceptualizations: An attempt at conceptual integration’ (IJP 3, 2015), I would like to raise two important issues which I feel are missing in the paper. The first concerns the need to consider the history of psychoanalysis when discussing a psychoanalytic concept, in particular the cultural and linguistic areas. The second issue concerns the need for a more complete evaluation of Kleinian ideas, especially Bion's development of Klein's understanding of phantasy.
I quite accept that the first issue I want to raise and remind you of could be considered if not my ‘pathology’ then at least an idée fixe of mine - my interest in the history of psychoanalysis. Die Phantasie and Traumphantasie are concepts belonging to the prehistory of psychoanalysis. And, one has to say, these terms do not belong so much to the natural sciences, but to German Romantic philosophy and literature.
As far as our discipline is concerned, we find them for instance in the Brautbriefe, in the love letters exchanged between Freud and Martha during the long period of their engagement. In 1882, already in the first letters they exchanged, Freud and Martha both tried to make sense of their dreams - their internal passionate emotional life - using expressions like die Phantasie and die Traumphantasie, not to mention even das Unbewusste. Those expressions came from their cultural, philosophical, and poetical backgrounds and from readings related so much to German and European Romanticism (Grubrich-Simitis, 2011; Steiner, 2013a).
But then, to understand what the terms die Phantasie and die Traumphantasie started to mean in our discipline, we should explore the Freud/Fliess