Fantasy (psychology) - Klein and Unconscious Fantasy

Klein and Unconscious Fantasy

Melanie Klein extended Freud's concept of fantasy to cover the developing child's relationship to a world of internal objects. In her thought, this kind of 'play activity inside the person is known as "unconscious fantasy". And these phantasies are often very violent and aggressive. They are different from ordinary day-dreams or "fantasies" (spelled with an "f")'.

The term "fantasy" became a central issue with the development of the Kleinian group as a distinctive strand within the British Psycho-Analytical Society, and was at the heart of the so-called Controversial discussions of the wartime years. 'A paper by Susan Isaacs (1952) on "The nature and function of Phantasy"...has been generally accepted by the Klein group in London as a fundamental statement of their position'. As a defining feature, 'Kleinian psychoanalysts regard the unconscious as made up of phantasies of relations with objects. These are thought of as primary and innate, and as the mental representations of instincts...the psychological equivalents in the mind of defence mechanisms'.

Isaacs considered that 'Unconscious phantasies exert a continuous influence throughout life, both in normal and neurotic people, the difference lying in the specific character of the dominant phantasies'; Most schools of psychoanalytic thought would now accept that 'Both in analysis and life, we perceive reality through a veil of unconscious fantasy'. Isaacs however claimed that 'Freud's "hallucinatory wish-fulfilment" and his.."introjection" and "projection" are the basis of the fantasy life'; and how far unconscious fantasy was a genuine development of Freud's ideas, how far it represented the formation of a new psychoanalytic paradigm, is perhaps the key question of the Controversial discussions.