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Chair: Stefano Bolognini
Presenters: Douglas Chavis, Paula Ellman, Nancy Goodman
Discussants: Dana Birksted-Breen, Abel Fainstein
Stefano Bolognini opened this panel with the comment that contemporary psychoanalysis is revisiting seminal concepts with a new freedom and an attempt to delve into the earliest levels of experience, an implicit reference to the IPA's 2015 Panel on Conceptual Integration, which re-examined the notion of unconscious fantasy. At least two of the papers on this panel were entries into that conversation, which asks if unconscious fantasy is a construction of the analyst and patient that emerges in the analytic process, or is a phenomenon that exists in the mind independent of clinical engagement.
In the first paper, Douglas Chavis noted that although unconscious fantasy is a foundational concept in psychoanalysis, there is much controversy as to what it is and what the concept refers to. He referenced Bohleber's 2015 report which suggests that we cannot “know” whether unconscious fantasy exists, and should focus instead on how it gets elaborated in the analytic dyad. He also cited Jimenez, who notes an “intrinsic relation” between the concept of enactment and unconscious fantasy, and suggests that part of the phenomenology of unconscious fantasy is the “illusion” that it exists prior to the interpretive or meaning-making activities of the analytic dyad.
Chavis proceeded to discuss the impact of psychoanalytically informed infant research, in particular the work of Beebe and Lachman, which provides a pathway for understanding how the earliest representational capacities of the infant get laid down in somato-motor action sequences that create inner working models which are posited to be the basis for attachment relationships. These sorts of representations exist on a less abstract theoretical level than unconscious fantasy and constitute procedural action sequence expectancies that may begin as early as birth, and are based on the repetition of even