Lacan, Fantasy, and Desire
Lacan engaged from early on with 'the phantasies revealed by Melanie Klein...the imago of the mother...this shadow of the bad internal objects ' - with the Imaginary. Increasingly, however, it was Freud's idea of fantasy as a kind of 'screen-memory, representing something of more importance with which it was in some way connected' that was for him of greater importance. Lacan came to believe that 'the phantasy is never anything more than the screen that conceals something quite primary, something determinate in the function of repetition'.
Phantasies thus both link to and block off the individual's unconscious, his kernel or real core: ' subject and real are to be situated on either side of the split, in the resistance of the phantasy ', which thus comes close to the centre of the individual's personality and its splits and conflicts. 'The subject situates himself as determined by the phantasy...whether in the dream or in any of the more or less well-developed forms of day-dreaming'; and as a rule 'a subject's fantasies are close variations on a single theme...the "fundamental fantasy"...minimizing the variations in meaning which might otherwise cause a problem for desire'.
The goal of therapy thus became ' la traversee du fantasme, the crossing over, traversal, or traversing of the fundamental fantasy'. For Lacan, 'The traversing of fantasy involves the subject's assumption of a new position with respect to the Other as language and the Other as desire...a utopian moment beyond neurosis'. The question he was left with was 'What, then, does he who has passed through the experience...who has traversed the radical phantasy...become?'.
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