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By 'General Psychology' Milner means psychology as it is understood by an academic psychologist. She discusses a book with this title (by W. J. H. Sprott, 1937) with reference to his understanding of psychoanalytic theory. Milner feels that general psychology often has misgivings about the form in which psychoanalytic concepts are presented rather than about their content. She questions whether, 'when the general psychologist talks of sentiments [attitudes] and the psychoanalyst of internal objects we may not in fact be talking about the primitive form of the same thing'.
In an attempt to answer this question the main body of Milner's paper is an investigation of the use of fantasy and the image, 'the question of the form which … first knowing takes before experience is verbalized'.
The image has two functions: 'the primitive knowing or interpreting experience and the primitive substitute for action'. But the former must be subdivided into that referring to subjective experience and that referring to objective experience. The wish-fulfilling function and that of interpreting objective experience are barely recognized by academic psychology. What is still less understood is the concept of introjection and the function of fantasy and imagery as an expression of our manifold subjective experiences in our attitudes toward introjected objects and their reprojected forms. Milner clarifies each of these functions with the help of clinical material and at the same time attempts to show that the content behind the form of expression of the academic psychologist and the psychoanalyst are similar but that academic psychology had simply not gone far enough. She ends with a plea: 'It seems to me that it is in connection with the mental phenomena included under the term fantasy that the general psychologist and the psychoanalyst can most fruitfully meet. Thus if the psychoanalyst, with his special instrument for the study of fantasy, and the general psychologist, with hi