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Susan Isaacs was chosen by Klein to present the opening paper in the Controversial Discussions held by the British Psychoanalytical Society between 1941 and 1945. Almost 70 years later, Isaacs’ contribution holds up not simply as an historical landmark in the development of a psychoanalytic theory of thinking, but as a critical part of contemporary analytic theory. Isaacs’ paper, “The nature and function of phantasy” (pre-circulated and presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society on 27 January, 1943) is at the same time a “scientific” psychoanalytic paper (a paper that presents and develops an original idea that is accompanied by supporting evidence) and a political position paper – a paper intended to establish Klein as a disciple of Freud, and not a “heretic” (Steiner, 1991, p. 248) whose ideas so diverged from Freud’s that her work no longer deserved to be viewed as psychoanalysis.
The version of Isaacs’ paper that I will be discussing was published in Developments in Psychoanalysis (1952), a collection of papers written and edited by Klein and her “inner circle” of Isaacs, Heimann and Rivière. The original paper (Isaacs, 1943a) – much briefer than the 1952 version and structured quite differently – does, at times, express ideas more compellingly than the 1952 version. I will cite such passages in the earlier version of the paper when they elucidate ideas being developed in the later one.
A good deal of the importance of Isaacs’ (1952) contribution lies in her groundbreaking conception of the work of phantasy, which she clearly and systematically presents. And yet I find that much of what makes Isaacs’ contribution pivotal to the development of psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
resides in what is only implicit in her paper. Specifically, it seems to me that Isaacs does not fully recognize that her paper is not a paper about the nature and function of phantasy, but a paper about the nature and the function of phantasying, that