Concept
Primal fantasy
Freud's term for a small set of typical fantasies found in all neurotics, among them the primal scene, seduction and castration, which he thought might be a phylogenetic inheritance filling the gaps in individual experience. Laplanche and Pontalis read them as fantasies of origins: each stages an answer to an enigma of beginnings, the primal scene to the origin of the individual, seduction to the origin of sexuality, castration to the origin of the difference between the sexes.
Read more- Narrower concepts
- Primal scene
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 3
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1915 Freud named the Urphantasien in ‘A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psycho-Analytic Theory of the Disease’ (1915): the fantasies of observing parental intercourse, of seduction and of castration. In Lecture 23 of the Introductory Lectures (1916–17) he suggested they were a phylogenetic endowment.
developed by
- Jean Laplanche 1964 In ‘Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme’ (1964), Laplanche and Pontalis read Freud's primal fantasies (the primal scene, seduction and castration) as fantasies of origins. Each stages an answer to an enigma of the subject's beginning: the origin of the subject, of sexuality, and of the difference between the sexes.
- Jean-Bertrand Pontalis 1964 Pontalis wrote the 1964 essay with Laplanche. It treats Freud's primal fantasies as fantasies of origins and as the structure within which the subject's own fantasy takes place.
critiqued by
- Jean Laplanche 2000 Looking back in 2000 on the 1964 essay he wrote with Pontalis, Laplanche called it the historical unearthing of Freud's concept rather than an endorsement of it. He rejected Freud's grounding of primal fantasies in inherited memory and put in their place codes supplied by culture, among them the Oedipus complex.