Arlow on Unconscious Fantasy

Although I have particular personal reasons for focusing on Jacob Arlow's pivotal role in developing our appreciation of the importance of unconscious fantasy in psychoanalytic theory and practice, it is hardly the case that mine is an idiosyncratic choice of emphasis. In point of fact, his obituary in the New York Times highlighted that aspect of his scientific endeavors; its headline referred to him as the “analyst of fantasy in the unconscious.”

Jack's thinking on the subject of unconscious fantasy continued to evolve in depth, sophistication, and complexity during his long career as a contributor to psychoanalytic theory. He applied his understanding of it as an explanatory concept to examine a wide range of clinical phenomena, including deja vu, depersonalization, and other disturbances of the sense of self and reality, to certain types of parapraxes, and to mood disturbances. He also made use of his appreciation of unconscious fantasy as a contribution to our psychoanalytic understanding of mythology, religious rituals, and metaphor, among other aspects of popular culture. A detailed recounting of the specifics of his many articles that touch on the topic of unconscious fantasy would warrant at least a full-length paper, if not a monograph in its own right, so for our present purpose I shall concentrate on just a few of his most important ideas.

The interested reader would do well to look (again) at two of Jack's seminal contributions, a pair of articles that appeared in tandem in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. “Unconscious Fantasy and Disturbances of Conscious Experience” and “Fantasy, Memory, and Reality Testing.” . In the first of these groundbreaking papers, he summarized the essence of his novel insight in the following words:

Unconscious daydreaming is a constant feature of mental life. It is an ever-present accompaniment of conscious experience. What is consciously apperceived and experienced is the result of the interaction between the data of experien