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One of Freud's earliest discoveries was that in the unconscious, memories and phantasies are not distinguished – hence his abandonment of his earliest theory of neurosis, the ‘seduction’ or ‘affect trauma’ theory. From that time onwards phantasies have been of central interest. In this chapter I discuss the ideas of Freud and Klein regarding this interesting and complex concept. Throughout the discussion of their ideas about phantasy I refer briefly to the Controversial Discussions of the British Society in the 1940s in which the concept of phantasy played a central role. I then describe certain more recent but minor changes in the Kleinian use of the concept. The chapter ends with brief conjectures about the use of the concept in other current schools of psychoanalysis.
Considering its importance, it is perhaps surprising that Freud did not devote even a paper to the concept of phantasy, let alone a book. His ideas on it are scattered about in the first 20 years of his psychoanalytic writings. His most explicit theoretical statements about it are to be found in his paper ‘Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning’ in 1911 and in Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1916). In her work with children Klein gradually developed a rather different view from that of Freud. Klein's view was explicitly stated by Susan Isaacs in a paper called ‘The nature and function of phantasy’ which was the central theoretical issue of the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1943 (King and Steiner 1991). The various views on phantasy voiced at the Discussions are clearly described and discussed by Anne Hayman (1989).