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This paper was first given at a meeting of the European Psycho-Analytical Federation, Rome, 1981, and first appeared in the Bulletin of the European Psychoanalytical Federation 17 (1981): 11-24.
We are asked in this symposium to have a new look at the question of defence mechanisms and phantasy in the analytic process. When one looks into the literature it is clear that this area has been revisited and reviewed a number of times before. I refer, for example, to Dr Van der Leeuw's interesting survey of the literature as recently as 1971, ‘On the development of the concept of defence’. I do not intend to go over the historical background again but rather to concentrate on the question of phantasy in relation to defence mechanisms and some clinical aspects of this.
What I have to say is essentially grounded in the classic paper on phantasy by Susan Isaacs, ‘The nature and function of phantasy’ (1952). Susan Isaacs discusses the central role of phantasy throughout mental life and functioning — in development, normal character formation, and in illness. Basing her work on Melanie Klein's findings she discusses defence mechanisms in relation to mental mechanisms in general, and describes how these are related to particular forms of phantasy — originating in bodily instinctual experience. Such ideas, she shows, were already, in part, inherent in much of Freud's thinking, for example, on the nature of projection and introjection and hallucinatory wish-fulfilment. She describes how the relation between phantasy and wish-fulfilment, for example, had always been emphasized but that, as she puts it, most phantasies ‘also serve other purposes as well, e.g. denial, reassurance, omnipotent control, reparation, etc.’. Thus Klein and Isaacs stress the central role of phantasy in the building of object relations, anxiety, and defences against anxiety.
Freud, as is well known, did not just list defences, but saw them as in
some way related to each other and related to certain types of