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It is old news that a conscious fantasy is itself a compromise formation, incorporating both wish and defence and serving both gratifying and adaptive functions. Still and all, not much theoretical attention is paid to conscious fantasy in the psychoanalytic literature, perhaps out of fear that emphasis will be withdrawn from unconscious fantasy. And what interest there is has generally focused more on connecting the conscious fantasy to unconscious fantasy than on tracing its permutations, enactments, and role in adaptation.2
Yet conscious fantasies (or daydreams) are as relevant to the future as they are to the past. Their importance attaches to their fate, not just to their history, and to their role in adaptation, not just to their sources. Clinical observation tells us that while some fantasies are invoked as substitute gratifications to assuage desire, still others describe or delineate desire and point the way to action. Conscious fantasies sometimes serve as dress rehearsals, as guides to behaviour.
Since, by definition, the nature of unconscious fantasy3 is inferred, we can only gauge its changes through modification in symptoms, dreams or other of its products. But we are privy to observing sequential changes in conscious fantasies. Fantasies, based on desire and imagination, are living things, always changing and moving. That conscious fantasies are malleable and evolve with some regularity Freud had already observed by 1908:
We must not suppose that…the various phantasies, castles in the air, and daydreams…are stereotyped or unalterable. On the contrary, they fit themselves into the subject’s shifting impressions of life, change with every change in a situation, and receive from every fresh, active impression what might be called a ‘date-mark’…. Thus past, present and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that runs through them.
Here Freud clearly indicates that many fantasies are able to undergo change—evolutio