Chapter 2 Phantasy

Freud’s discovery of unconscious thoughts underlying hysterical symptoms can be seen as equivalent to the discovery of unconscious phantasy. He showed how conflicts, instincts, and defences are expressed and contained in an unconscious phantasy, such as, for instance the phantasy of fellatio in Dora’s globus hystericus. Originally he thought of phantasies mainly as defences against memory: ‘Phantasies are psychical façades constructed in order to bar the way to these memories’ (Freud 1950 [1897]: Letter to Fliess). Having abandoned his seduction theory in favour of the view that seduction scenes which were apparently remembered or recovered from repression and believed to be fact were most frequently a child’s wish-fulfilment phantasy, he gave phantasy a major place: ‘Hysterical symptoms are not attached to actual memories but to phantasies erected on the basis of memories’ (Freud 1900:491).

In a letter to Fliess (21 September 1897), Freud says that his discovery made him realize that phantasies are as real and important as any external reality. After that he sometimes spoke of phantasy as the psychic reality (Freud 1914c: 18; 1925a: 34).

Unlike his theory of dreams, Freud never worked out in full a theory of unconscious phantasy. He never devoted a book, or even a paper, wholly to that subject, despite the importance of the concept in his work.

One could say that generally for Freud phantasy is pretty close to day-dreaming. It is a wish-fulfilling idea which comes into play when external reality is frustrating. Basically, a phantasy consists of an unconscious wish worked on by the capacity for logical thought so as to give rise to a disguised expression and imaginary fulfilment of the instinctual wish. Phantasies remain subordinate to the pleasure principle, but they are formed by the ‘secondary process’; that is, by the normal rational logic that is characteristic of the Systems Preconscious and Conscious. Hence Freud sees phantasy as a rather late phenomenon, appear