Editors' Introduction

This is the first of a series of issues we will be presenting from time to time devoted to a core phenomenon of clinical psychoanalysis.

The topic of this first issue is: Unconscious Fantasy. It is perhaps Freud's second great discovery, after the unconscious itself. Soon after Freud discovered that there was a part of the human mind functioning beneath conscious awareness, he also discovered that this unconscious part of the mind was not simply a disorganized collection of primitive ideas, but also contained some highly organized systems of thoughts and affects, which had cohesion, duration, and meaning. Chief amongst these was of course the group of fantasies characteristic of the oedipal period, but fantasy systems organized during all periods of life were soon discovered.

Psychoanalysts of every generation have concerned themselves with unconscious fantasy, which plays a major part in every psychoanalysis. Perhaps no analyst has explored this subject so productively as Dr. Jacob Arlow. He is one of those analysts whose contributions have been so fundamental that we use them every day without attribution. Therefore it is particularly fitting that the bulk of this issue devoted to unconscious fantasy comprises the first half of an all-day symposium on that subject, dedicated to Dr. Arlow. Not one to accept honors passively, Dr. Arlow participated actively in the symposium. His contributions are published in full. We will discuss the symposium in more detail subsequently. But first, to set the clinical stage, as it were, we are pleased to present an original paper by Dr. Daniel Birger, in which an unconscious fantasy played a significant role in the analysis of an individual patient.

This will illustrate for the reader, in a manner more vivid than an abstract discussion, the clinical phenomenon of unconscious fantasy which will then be discussed in more detail by the various participants in the symposium.