The Birth And Death of a Defensive Fantasy*

Although my treatment of child and adult patients had already revealed that a child may create a defensive fantasy in response to the parents' wish for infanticide and resort to acting it out when the parents' violence transforms the wish into a threat, it was not until my treatment of four-and-a-half-year-old Larry, whose case I referred to briefly in “The Use of Interpretation,”† that it became clear that there may be a particular moment of danger when such a fantasy may be born and another when the passing of the danger allows it just as suddenly to be relinquished. This concept appears so basic to an understanding of fantasy that I should like to develop it at some length here. That a defensive fantasy may also be reinstated at a later time, if required, was suggested in the case of a forty-year-old patient when her reawakened interest in a heterosexual relationship revived both her terror of being killed by her mother and the fantasy which she had created at four and a half at a moment of suddenly heightened peril, in order to defend herself against this fear.

I have known instances where adult homosexual patients, who had succeeded in dissolving the unusual severity of their repressions, were able to resurrect the particular incidents that necessitated their homosexual defense, but only in Larry's case have I actually witnessed not only the instantaneous recollection of the exact moment of danger which had catapulted him into assuming a different identity, but also the precise moment when he felt secure enough to abandon it and once more to become himself. Although I had always assumed that a reduction of the environmental threat and the feeling of being loved played a significant role in restoring a child to health, until my sessions