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What is unconscious fantasy? Where and how can it be found? The analytic process of “finding”, presented by Paula Ellman and Nancy Goodman in their book Finding Unconscious Fantasy in Narrative, Trauma and Body Pain: A Clinical Guide, actualizes this concept and locates it in the clinical arena.
The role of unconscious fantasy with regard to symptom development in trauma, and the recognition of its derivatives for therapeutic action, integrates and unifies the field of psychoanalysis. Analytic cases of severely traumatized patients who express and experience affects and psychic material concretely and somatically illustrate how the finding process can “transform pain into psychic suffering and bring the unsymbolized into a symbolizing process” (Ellman 2017b, 41).
An international forum of renowned writers and practitioners from diverse theoretical backgrounds, many of whom have written extensively on trauma and somatic symptoms, examine unconscious fantasy in their own clinical work. Eight cases, four of which are “observed” by two outside analysts from differing theoretical perspectives, elucidate the process and its therapeutic action. Using basic psychoanalytic foundations these process-filled case examples reveal how understanding and use of unconscious fantasy in transference/countertransference manifestations, dreams, free associations and bodily experience become transformative moments in treatment.
Ellman and Goodman use the concept of fantasy in an expansive way, spelled with an f- or a ph- according to the referenced theory. As the core of psychic life and central to psychoanalysis, unconscious fantasy includes “the primal inborn fantasy and the derivatives over time, and also infantile fantasies from each developmental phase” (Ellman and Goodman 2017, 6). They refer to David Bell’s definition of this concept as illustration of its breadth:
Phantasy as scene. Phantasy as representation of drive; Phantasy as representation of wish as its fulfillment; Phanta