Since the fantasy is the concrete manifestation of the unconscious, it has become the favourite object of psychoanalytic research, whereas whenever reality is not understood in the sense of “psychical reality”, it has inevitably been pushed into the background and described in essentially negative terms as something which is not present in the unconscious and is thus absent from the transference. It is perhaps impossible to identify a sector or function of the mind that can do without the unconscious fantasy. It is, however, equally difficult to imagine any model of psychical development which does not refer to reality, even though when one tries to define it, it seems to vanish into haziness or dissolve, and we are left with a naive and often banal clinical use of the term. I will thus try to examine this concept from its Freudian origins to the present, in the hope