You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Girard shares in the recent interest in the nature of the personal history as told and discovered in an analysis. There have been different approaches to the past, according to one's theoretical viewpoint. Viderman has argued that a new history
is created in the process of analysis. Construction and reconstruction, history and fantasy, can at times be difficult to differentiate. Much of Freud's early work was concerned with daydreams and their relationship to dreams and symptoms. Girard reviews Freud's writings on this topic and discusses the various categories: daydreams, fantasies, reveries, screen memories, adolescent daydreaming, the family romance, masturbatory fantasies, and infantile sexual theories. The unity of the fantasizing function seems to rest in the latent content, permitting transformations and linkages with the manifest content. The daydream as a locus of exchanges and transformations has a privileged position in an analysis. A patient's proclivity for daydreaming permitted Girard to follow the evolution of the fantasies and the fantasizing function. To be able to tell stories indicates access to the field of illusion and the organization of its forms, and requires a certain maturative evolution. It is also a step in the mastery of ambivalence and of identifications. It indicates the establishment of a sense of reality which can permit this particular play of pleasure and anxiety. Girard reviews the progress of the case in which fantasy life was progressively reintegrated into psychoanalytic process, with greater definition of the personages and roles in the fantasies. This led to a differentiation of parental images and a mobilization of affect.