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.
The Continuing Forum is open to all readers so that they may send their reactions, suggestions, criticism and contributions to the topics which are presented in The Psychoanalytic Forum.
To the Editors: The problem of the drag of older ideas militating against the adequate recognition of the all-embracing element of the “personal,” appears in the theory of phantasy. Hanna Segal [“Melanie Klein's Technique,” The Psychoanalytic Forum, Vol. 2, No. 3] defines phantasy as “the psychic representative of a bodily aim,” a definition rigidly limited to ‘instinct theory.‘ Phantasy certainly includes that, but, as the primary form of psychic experience, it must basically be the psychic representative of the primal unity of the psyche itself, of its potentiality for becoming an ego, a self, an “I” who owns the impulses as a whole psyche, though not yet at first having come to self-consciousness as an “I.” It is perhaps easiest to see how important a part this must play in basic phantasy by comparison with the patient's state in its absence, by studying the frightening intensity of phantasies of isolation and ego-loss, of non-entity, loss of relationship, of being blind, deaf and dumb, of falling into a bottomless abyss, of not having a whole ego or self, of feeling the internal disarray of disintegration. When the primary psychic unity is lost in an “unfacilitating environment” (Winnicott), then phantasy expresses the differing aspects of the split ego as described in theories of endopsychic structure.
In her paper, Dr. Segal writes: “It is Isaacs' contention that what we call mechanisms of defense is an abstract definition from an observer's point of view of what is in fact the functioning of unconscious phantasy.” That is a highly important insight. “Mechanism” is an abstract definition from outside the mental process itself; it is the “objective scientific observer's” language. The reality of the subjective experience is quite different; it is personal in the fu