The Investigation of Self-Representational Fantasies and Its Impact on the Psychoanalytic Process

Various tactics and techniques have been recommended and used over the past decades to engage patients in the process of psychoanalytic therapy. This article describes and explains a technique that has been hinted at by some and advocated by others but has never been described in a way that would make it easy to apply or test. We refer specifically to the direct focusing of the analytic work on the self-representational fantasies revealed by the patient. As Brenner (1969) has pointed out, “every aid to the development of proficiency in the difficult skill of clinical analytic work is welcome and technical precepts rank high on the list of such aids” (p. 313). At the same time he points out that “technical precepts must be firmly based on theory just as theories must be continually tested against the clinical data obtained through our work with patients” (p. 351). Following this suggestion we first try to define the concept of “self-representational fantasy” in a clinically useful manner while placing it in the framework of current psychoanalytic theory. We then try to indicate how in various ways the analysis of self-representational fantasies has been alluded to directly and indirectly in the past and finally, with specific clinical examples, try to show how this tactic can be useful in our analytic work, while addressing some of the problems involved.

Beres and Joseph (1970) have suggested that unconscious mental representations form the “basis of all conscious psychic activities … and whereas the conscious derivatives are observable manifestations, we know nothing of the nature of the unconscious representations … the outward manifestations of these unconscious phenomena may appear in action or in thought and provide for the wide diversity of human behavior” (p. 8). In other words, “the conscious derivatives of these mental representations are the symbols images, fantasies, dreams, hallucinations