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We have surveyed the history of the concept of unconscious fantasy, from its inception in Freud's theorizing to the transformation of its structure and function in the late 1960s. The demands of clinical practice, the increasing focus on the nature of the analytic relation and the increasing attention to patient's actual experiences in infancy and childhood contributed to the waning of reconstruction of the core-unconscious fantasy (the Oedipus complex) in the treatment process. Drastic changes in the concept occurred from the 1970s to the present, beginning with Kohut's reformulation of psychoanalysis, followed by contributions of intersubjectivity theorists, relational psychoanalysts and the Boston Study Group's innovative ideas. In the changes referred to in this article, Kohut's shift from drive-based unconscious fantasies to affective, lived, experience-based fantasies are the most significant ones. The introduction of the selfobject transferences confirmed the importance of our earlier finding (Ornstein and Ornstein, 1992) that patients enter into analysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy with a set of curative fantasies. With excerpts of two analyses we illustrated how the recognition of the curative fantasy, which embodies the patient's hopes and expectations (the search for a new beginning) may promote the analytic process.
Fantasy is … a human propensity [for an] extensive inner elaboration of experience [Kohut, 1963, p. 376].