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The increasing recognition of the significance of the aggressive tendencies in normal and above all in neurotic psychic processes, has in recent years led to a revision of the findings of psychoanalytic research with the result that in different psychic productions a new significance has been discovered. It has been seen that they are no longer to be considered as containing only positive libidinal tendencies but, almost without exception, negative destructive ones as well.
We investigate here the rescue fantasy for its aggressive content although the life-preserving, love-affirming attitude of the individual producing the fantasy towards the object to be rescued appears to contradict the presence of any aggressive intention.
Freud devoted some paragraphs to the rescue fantasy in his paper, Contribution to the Psychology of Love.1 He showed there that the rescue fantasy primarily expresses the wish to give back to the parents the life which one owes to them, by rescuing one or both of them from danger of death. Where the mother is concerned, we find tender emotions mixed with the longing to be big and independent at the origin of the fantasy. If the son rescues the father in his fantasy there is an attitude of defiance expressed in it, a denial of the fact that one has to thank one's father for one's life. In what Freud said, we find the first indication of a negative component in the rescue fantasy which has not been elaborated in analytic literature.
The content, 'rescuing', expresses only a part of the complex fantasy, for the object to be rescued must first have been brought into the danger from which the producer of the fantasy is to save it. The adolescent who fantasies saving