The Concept of Unconscious Fantasy

In 1937 when Anna Freud wrote The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, the focus of analysis was shifting toward the defenses, toward the analysis of resistance, and toward the ego. However, Anna Freud wrote in that volume, as a kind of disclaimer, that one used to think of oneself as an analyst only insofar as one was a depth analyst. I want to reiterate that idea: I cannot conceive of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic theory or psychodynamic therapy, for that matter, without the concept of unconscious functioning or unconscious fantasy. In fact we only deal with resistances and defensive operations in the service of understanding that which has been rendered unconscious. Let me start from that premise and then move through the evolution of our understanding of unconscious fantasy from Freud's early writing onward.

The initial aim of psychoanalysis was, as Freud (1903) said, to make the unconscious conscious. Patients suffered from reminiscences. Not only did they suffer from reminiscences but these reminiscences led to the formation of symptoms, because the memories constituted a foreign body that existed deep in their psyches. These had to be extricated so that laudible pus (a metaphor that was used to designate the evacuation of infections) could be drained, and also so that the release of affects connected to the memories could be brought to light and experienced. In such a model one has to postulate that the psychic apparatus has at least two parts, one conscious, one unconscious; and then, as a third party, there had to be mechanisms that caused originally conscious thoughts to be rendered unavailable to consciousness. These mechanisms could be collectively grouped under the name of repression. Thus, right from the beginning we had a tripartite mental structure: unconscious, conscious, and mechanisms along with a preconscious. The issue of preconscious as an intermediate level is something I am not going to belabor because it is not very important at this