Concept
Unconscious phantasy
The mental expression of the drives as Kleinian theory understands it: unconscious imaginings, at first bodily and wordless, in which the infant lives out its impulses as dealings with objects, such as taking them in, attacking them or being attacked by them. Freud spoke of unconscious phantasies as repressed or never-conscious day-dreams; Susan Isaacs, building on Melanie Klein's analyses of children, argued in 1943 that phantasy is at work from the start of life, is the primary content of all unconscious mental processes, and shapes perception, thinking, symptoms and the relation to the analyst. Freud's English translators spelt it 'phantasy' to keep it apart from conscious 'fantasy'.
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 1
developed by
- Susan Isaacs 1943 In 'The Nature and Function of Phantasy', read in 1943 at the opening of the Controversial Discussions and published in 1948, Isaacs widened Freud's notion of unconscious phantasy: phantasy is the mental expression of every drive, is active from the beginning of life, and is the primary content of all unconscious mental processes.
- Melanie Klein Isaacs credits Klein's analyses of young children with giving unconscious phantasy its growing weight; her own paper gave theoretical form to the concept as Klein used it.
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud Isaacs traces the psychoanalytic sense of the term to Freud, who came to recognise phantasies that are unconscious; the wider Kleinian concept builds on his.