Abstract
Revisiting Freud’s metapsychology regarding unconscious fantasy, and taking stock of Michel de M’Uzan’s exemplary study of the problem of unconscious affect, the author contends that, strictly speaking, no more than there are truly unconscious affects, there are no unconscious fantasies. Instead, the author describes a process of fantasy-building, briefly illustrated with clinical material and put to the test of other psychoanalytic conceptualizations such as primal fantasies, après-coup, psychosomatic theory and the masochistic fantasy in Freud’s “A child is being beaten.”
To Michel de M’Uzan, in memoriam.
After Freud’s (1897) abandonment of his seduction theory, fantasy 2 has been put at the core of psychoanalysis and its metapsychology. The literature about the subject is vast (see Bohleber et al., 2015). The present paper aims at coming to terms with what appears as a conceptual problem regarding unconscious fantasy. Bluntly put, there are no unconscious fantasies if we give the word unconscious its Freudian systemic meaning of something repressed. A similar issue has already been raised, notably by Bromberg (2008). But while Bromberg dismissed the existence of unconscious fantasies by dismissing Freudian metapsychology altogether, I hope to show that metapsychology is a consistent and effective tool for addressing the issue. It is a matter of adopting a theoretically parsimonious approach, which means staying with Freud’s models as long as possible before switching to other theoretical views. In this paper, we shall therefore be discussing (with) him and, if need be, arguing against him, though not breaking up with his rich theory.
The psychoanalytic reflection around the concept of fantasy must now and again be resumed given its central place in the theory, but also because of our natural tendency to drift away, often unawares, from the metapsychological to a more ordinary way of thinking. Already in 1948, in “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” Susan Isaacs (1948) deplored that the word “phantasy” has often been used to mark a contrast to “reality,” the latter word being taken as identical with “external” or “material” or “objective” facts. [This is] an implicit assumption which denies to psychical reality its own objectivity as a mental fact. Some analysts tend to contrast “phantasy” with “reality” in such a way as to undervalue the dynamic importance of phantasy. (p. 79)
Keeping with a rigorous approach to fantasy requires a constant effort lest we go back to the trivial dualities of internal versus external, subjective versus objective, fantasy versus reality. In other words, let’s not lose sight of the fact that psychic reality does not reflect a mere subjective point of view, but that, though housed at the heart of subjectivity, it is a nucleus that is both heterogeneous and resistant (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1964/in Scarfone, 2015a, p. 79) and that therefore, as Isaacs wrote, it has its own objectivity.
Freud: Tools and Problems
Falling back onto trivial duality sometimes seems to be induced by Freud himself when he describes fantasy as a well-formed entity, located as such “in” the unconscious. For instance, in 1908, Freud wrote, Unconscious phantasies have either been unconscious all along and have been formed in the unconscious; or—as is more often the case—they were once conscious phantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through “repression.” Their content may afterwards either have remained the same or have undergone alterations, so that the present unconscious phantasies are derivatives of the once conscious ones. (Freud, 1908/1959, p. 161)
A few lines above he had stated, my observations no longer leave any room for doubt that such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious; and as soon as the latter have become unconscious they may also become pathogenic—that is, they may express themselves in symptoms and attacks. (p. 160)
This is problematic in that Freud seems to consider fantasy and its becoming only in terms of the quality of being conscious or unconscious without addressing the heterogeneous character of unconscious fantasy with regard to everyday subjectivity. Fantasy thereby loses part of its structure, resulting in an impoverished version of psychical reality (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1964/in Scarfone, 2015a, pp. 78–80). For this reason, the question must be raised time and again of how to maintain a metapsychological stance regarding fantasy rather than a view aligned with the psychology of consciousness. Moreover, now that cognitive psychology itself has admitted there is an unconscious mental processing, psychoanalytic metapsychology also needs to be distinguished from a “psychology of unconsciousness.” In other words, we need to remember that, by contrast with metapsychology, “psychology” reflects the point of view of the Ego, with its purposive intentionality and its rationalizing. In the psychological view, the unconscious is not a system, but a mere non-conscious part of the mind, yet functioning along the same lines as the conscious and, just like the latter, dealing with representations. As for metapsychology, it deals with the unconscious (hereafter often designated as the Ucs) as a system operating under totally different laws, such as primary process, thing-presentations (rather than representations), lack of negation and a within a weird kind of temporality. 3
The psychological approach also bears what one could call a “sedimentary” conception of fantasy according to which well-formed entities accumulate “in” the unconscious. Breuer (1893/1955), for instance, describing his work with Anna O., wrote that every evening he’d put the patient under hypnosis and “[relieve] her of the whole stock of imaginative products which she had accumulated since [his] last visit” (p. 30). 4 Breuer’s cathartic method was abandoned by Freud along with hypnosis, but the “sedimentary” conception remained following which fantasies lie buried “in” the unconscious and need to be unearthed by a work similar to that of an archeologist. The archeological metaphor, however, is not as straightforward as is often presented. In one of his most detailed references to archeology, Freud (1964) made a point of distinguishing between analysis and archeology, namely by reminding that, contrary to what happens in archeology, the “artifacts” found by psychoanalysts are still “alive” and that where the work of the archeologist ends, that of the analyst is just beginning. 5
To a certain extent, the sedimentary conception is also present in the Kleinian theory of phantasy. The concept, as proposed by Susan Isaacs (1948), is rich and complex; still, remarkably, unconscious phantasy is defined by her as the direct expression of the drives and it “essentially connotes unconscious mental content, which may or may not become conscious” (p. 80). Thus, here again, unconscious fantasy refers to a well-formed psychic content that just lacks the conscious quality. This is a sedimentary view in that it does not consider the radical changes occurring across the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious domain. As for fantasy being the direct expression of the drives, this means completely ignoring the mechanism of après-coup (Nachträglichkeit), whose importance we will discuss later.
Then again, the source of these problems can be found in Freud himself. Thus, in “The Unconscious,” Freud (1915/1957) says, on the one hand, that fantasies are highly organized derivatives, located at the interface of two systems (Ucs and Pcs-Cs) while, on the other hand, he asserts that these derivatives “are unconscious and are incapable of becoming conscious” (pp. 190–191). The problem is then of reconciling their high degree of organization with their firmly asserted unconscious (repressed) status, given that, in that same paper, Freud characterizes the Ucs by the absence of negation and of temporal ordering and by a great mobility of cathexes—features hardly compatible with a high degree of organization. Not to mention that Freud shall also assert that the passage from the Ucs to the Pcs-Cs corresponds to a “progress towards a higher stage of psychic organization” (p. 192). More about this later.
“For Staying is nowhere” (Rilke, 1923)
In search of a solution to the contradictions just highlighted, many other of Freud’s contributions can be invoked. Soon after abandoning the seduction theory in 1897, thus opening the road to the primacy of fantasy, Freud formulated important ideas on the work of memory and on the dream life. In both cases, rather than a static, or sedimentary, situation, he described an unceasing movement of transcription and elaboration. The 1899 paper “Screen Memories” (Freud, 1899/1962) is highly representative of this as it proposes a dynamic conception of memory that has been corroborated in other, more recent fields of study (Edelman, 1990). Freud’s now famous conclusion to this paper is definitional, both in terms of the workings of memory and of analytic treatment: It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood; memories relating to our childhood may be all we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as the selection of memories themselves. (Freud, 1899/1962, p. 322)
Clearly, then, for Freud there are no “stacked” memories and memory is not a collection of well-formed recordings but a living process by which a recall in the present creates what we could call “new drafts.” What is more, these ever-new drafts contain changes brought about by motives “with no concern for historical accuracy” (Freud, 1899/1962). The unceasing productivity of conscious and unconscious psychic processes is also, of course, eminently illustrated in Freud’s major opus, The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900/1953a, 1900/1953b), where one could hardly find the notion of a “stock of dreams” from which to draw. On the contrary, each night procures new, original products of the dream-work. Even recurring dreams, with the possible exception of gravely traumatized patients, can, when carefully examined, be shown to contain slight variations, testimony to a constantly refreshed dream activity.
Several years later, this time concerning transference, Freud spoke of the existence of some unconscious “stereotype plate” (Klischee) resulting from “the combined operation of [the patient’s] innate disposition and the influences brought to bear on him during his early years” (Freud, 1912/1958, p. 99). The stereotype plate, however, is “constantly repeated—constantly reprinted afresh” (p. 100) and there can be many of these plates. This may at first seem to suggest a static accumulation of “prints,” faithfully reproducing the originals. Freud, however, hastened to correct this impression by adding that such a stereotype plate “is certainly not entirely insusceptible to change in the face of recent experiences.” A present and active process of “editing” is, here again, clearly evoked. Even more significantly, he complements his view of the “stereotype plate” by specifying that Our observations have shown that only a portion of these impulses which determine the course of erotic life have passed through the full process of psychical development. That portion is directed towards reality, is at the disposal of the conscious personality, and forms a part of it.
Let me underline “the full psychic development,” which for Freud is both conscious and directed towards reality. Freud (1912/1958) goes on, Another portion of the libidinal impulses has been held up in the course of development; it has been kept away from the conscious personality and from reality, and has either been prevented from further expansion except in phantasy or has remained wholly in the unconscious so that it is unknown to the personality’s consciousness. (Italics added)
Something is unconscious, therefore, only insofar as it has been halted in its psychic development. It is then logical to assume that what is unconscious cannot be fully developed and structured. Secondly, Freud specifies that this undeveloped part “has either been prevented from further expansion except in phantasy or has remained wholly in the unconscious” (italics added), suggesting that the “expansion in phantasy” differs from remaining “wholly in the unconscious.”
In the already quoted paper “The Unconscious,” Freud states that “the Ucs. is continued into what are known as derivatives” (Freud, 1915/1957, p. 190), adding that these derivatives “achieve a high degree of organization and reach a certain intensity of cathexis in the Pcs” (p. 193). The apparent contradiction we discussed earlier—highly organized yet unconscious derivatives—is then resolved when we understand that in the present passage the term unconscious actually refers to the pre-conscious (Pcs). And it is indeed at the pre-conscious level that the higher degree of organization is achieved, when the unconscious thing-presentations are linked with word-presentations (pp. 201–202). It follows, in my view, that until a fantasy can be spoken, it is unconscious but also not fully organized. It now remains to be discussed in what state is the fantasy, or its precursor, when still unconscious, and what sort of development it undergoes.
Affect-Building and Fantasy-Building
The fantasy-building process I have in mind has a distinguished precedent in analytic literature. It was formulated by Michel de M’Uzan (1970/1977) when he proposed an elegant solution regarding the problem of unconscious affect, a problem Freud raised in the same paper on the Unconscious (Freud, 1915/1957, p. 177–179). De M’Uzan proposed that though in daily parlance analysts may well keep using the expression “unconscious affects,” there is actually no such thing as an “unconscious affect,” but there is a process of affect-building: Affect in its full meaning, that is, delimited and inextricably linked to the existence of an Ego capable of feeling it . . . can be found only at a late stage of the more or less complete, more or less complex trajectory of an affect-building process (processus d’affectation), a trajectory which supposes the splitting of primitive conglomerates and ending with new articulations and dissociations. (p. 100, my translation)
Hence, “in” the Unconscious (but you also could say the Id) there are no affects but only “potential seeds”—this is how de M’Uzan translates the German word Ansatzmöglichkeit used by Freud (1915/2010, p. 276), and which Strachey translated as “potential beginnings” (Freud, 1915/1957, p. 178). 6 These “seeds” undergo what de M’Uzan (1970/1977) describes as a “movement of progressive differentiation which can be arrested by accidents in the articulation between sensations, thing-presentations and word-presentations” (p. 100, my translation).
De M’Uzan’s idea, as can be seen, is concordant with—and builds on—Freud’s views. Much in the same vein, I propose that just as, strictly speaking, there are no unconscious affects, there are also no unconscious phantasies—or no phantasies “in” the Unconscious. Instead, I posit a process of fantasy-building, similar to—and actually connected with—that of affect-building. It is a process whose end-result and final manifestation is a fully developed fantasy when it has reached the “higher stage of psychic organization” that Freud spoke of. From the nuclei of thing-presentations, the process ultimately leads to the staging of a fantasy whose contents can be construed thanks to various inferences made from disjoint elements in the patient’s associations. Such inferences allow for the linking of thing-presentations to word-presentations, so that a degree of representability is reached, thus giving them access to the field of consciousness. This in turn, allows for modes of expression that can both name and stage the affective dimension. Hence, just as there is affect only as a belated development on the trajectory of affect-building, so fantasy proper only appears at some advanced phase in the process of fantasy-building. In the course of analysis, either the patient brings to the session an already formed (and hence pre-conscious-conscious) fantasy, or a fantasy is constructed in situ, as an après-coup discursive elaboration of some unconscious “potential seed.” These unconscious seeds of fantasies, in the form of thing-like mnemonic traces, are actually difficult to distinguish from the proto-affective “potential beginnings” (Ansatzmöglichkeit) posited by Freud and highlighted by de M’Uzan. An inchoate, thing-like unconscious element shall indeed evolve into an ideo-affective, that is, fully psychic formation, upon which repression can operate by separating the thing-like, quantitative side (affect) from the word-presentations that make the thing “speakable” and therefore consciously felt. Affect and fantasy development run therefore as parallels, to say the least. 7
Putting The Model to the Test
But what is a fantasy-building process? How and with what material does it operate ? We need not look very far for an answer. The already mentioned dream-work and the work of memory both offer a template that—following the principle of theoretical parsimony—can be legitimately applied to other domains of psychic functioning. In what follows I shall attempt give a better idea of the fantasy-building process by putting it to the test (i.e., confronting it to other psychoanalytic concepts).
Fantasy-Building and the Freudian Unconscious
In what precedes, guided by the parsimony principle, I was able to point at a similar topographical structure and a similar mode of functioning between various elements of the psychoanalytic domain (memory, dreams, transference and affect). Such similarity is not surprising; it reflects a rigorous metapsychological conception of the Unconscious itself as dealing with thing-presentations, that is, with forms which can be given access to consciousness only when associated to—and modulated by—word-presentations. I have developed elsewhere (Scarfone, 2015b) a number of ideas on this thing-like aspect of the Unconscious, whose notion in Freud goes as far back as On Aphasia (Freud, 1891/1953c) and Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895/1966). In the latter work, the Thing (das Ding) is located within a “perception complex” also known as the “complex of the fellow human being” (p. 331). In the perception complex, the Thing is the part that evades being judged, it is incomprehensible, while another part is readily understandable as a predicate or attribute of the fellow human being. Understandable, shall we say, therefore speakable. So we find an exact parallel between the structure of the perceptual complex and that of the psychic apparatus: a thing-like nucleus covered by a speakable shell (Scarfone, 2015b). It is the same relationship that can be found between, on the one hand, what we have seen in de M’Uzan as kernels of potential affect (or, more generally, kernels of thing-presentations), and, on the other hand, their fully developed pre-conscious forms, potentially available to consciousness.
In formulating his second model of the mind, Freud (1923/1961b) went back—not without hesitation—to a qualitative conception of the Unconscious i.e. something simply devoid of the conscious quality—therefore quite different from the systemic unconscious he had described until then. But, unsurprisingly, in the same text he was compelled to compensate such a drastic turn by conceiving of an Id—or an It—i.e., once again, an impersonal, thing-like unconscious. In that same work, however, he reasserts that “becoming conscious” happens by adjoining word-presentations to a “something” (p. 22), or to “some material which remains unknown” (p. 20). Noticeably, then, in this second Freudian model, the basic structure as well as the relationships between its parts, as described earlier, are preserved: what is unconscious in the strict sense cannot be well-formed nor, for that matter, known. A fully developed fantasy script, therefore, cannot be found within the boundaries of the system Ucs (or of the Id). This, however, did not bring Freud to put into question his theory of primal fantasies as the nuclei of the Unconscious.
Fantasy-Building and Primal Fantasies
Primal fantasies, which Freud went as far as linking with phylogenetic transmission, are thus the first problem to be tackled for putting to the test the viability of our notion of a fantasy-building process. Let me mention immediately that a phylogenetic transmission of mnemonic contents is highly questionable from a biological point of view. Laplanche (1987/2016) has radically rejected such hypothesis and has put forward a rival theory resting on the reformulation and generalization of Freud’s seduction theory. In short, the fantasies that Freud thought to be genetically inherited and to form the kernel of the Unconscious are for Laplanche the end-product of infantile sexual theories. Far, therefore, from constituting the foundations of the Unconscious, they result from a counter-cathexis: they are not “primal” in any sense, but part of the infant’s response to the disturbing impact of the drives. For instance, castration fantasy does not emerge directly on the level of the drives but, on the contrary, has the function of mastering, of containing both the anarchic aspect of the drives and also the drive’s questioning aspect. . . . Castration, whether one calls it a theory, a fantasy or even a primal fantasy, is above all an answer and not a question intrinsic to a drive. (Laplanche, 1987/2016, pp. 43–44)
Thus, the present notion of a process of fantasy-building, derived as we saw from de M’Uzan’s thinking, is also clearly in line with Laplanche’s views. To constitute an “answer,” fantasy must indeed result from a process of elaboration that starts with the “potential seeds” of a response, on the way toward what will be manifest in the après-coup as a well-formed fantasy.
Can, however, this alternate conception of primal fantasies account for their apparent universality? Let us first note that fantasies of seduction, castration or primal scene are general forms that can be imprinted on the human experience in all its variety. For instance, according to Laplanche, before being a fantasy, seduction is an inescapable fact resulting from the fundamental anthropological situation into which we are all born, a situation marked by the sexual discrepancy between adult and infant. As for castration, it pertains to the logical category of cutting-off and the idea of amputation of a sexual organ is but a secondary form thereof (Laplanche, 1987/2016, p. 44). By the way, castration is a form of negation, therefore it can hardly be located at the foundations of the unconscious as this would run directly against Freud’s assertion that the Unconscious does not contain negation. As for the primal scene, it is itself a part of the inescapable seduction in its generalized form. Before being a fantasy, it is enigmatically given to be seen, about which Freud wrote things well in line with what I hinted earlier regarding the relationship between the opaque Thing and its readily understandable outer shell. He indeed wrote that sexual intercourse between adults is disturbing and provokes anxiety in children because it evades their understanding and therefore they cannot cope with it (Freud, 1900/1953a, p. 585). This resonates well with Laplanche’s view that the scene is seductive by being enigmatic. The primal scene fantasy is therefore an effort at mastering—that is, it is an infantile theory built on the basis of—the enigmatic scene offered to the sight of the child, or of its avatars; it constitutes a specific interpretation aimed at containing the excitation provoked by either the actual scene or other enigmatic messages related to it.
It should be added that the infantile theorizing at work during the fantasy-building process is built from materials obtained either through direct experience or through allusions and narratives or by observing animals. More generally, it can be said that the subject borrows its construction materials from the thesaurus of images and mytho-symbolic elements provided by the cultural milieu. Moreover, and more importantly, the theorizing rests on the resonance between the elements brought in from the outside and what is experienced in the erogenous body. These bodily experiences are induced or activated by the impact of what Laplanche calls “early seduction” (the anecdotal events within the larger frame of generalized seduction)—a seduction linked to the unavoidable excitation of the zones of transit and exchange in the child’s body, points of major interest during maternal care. The mother or her substitute is, in those instances, the empirical representative of the “fellow human being” mentioned in Freud’s “perceptual complex” (see above). It is the Other who, as already seen, is subdivided by perception into a comprehensible part (the predicate) and an opaque Thing. The Thing, that is, the nonelaborated remnant of the communication with the Other, installs itself as the inextinguishable source of what will thereafter become internal drives (Laplanche, 1984/1999a). The process of fantasy-building is thus indeed an elaborative process starting from a rather opaque element, a rather obscure “affective structure” (Affektbildung) which presses the subject—as the situation may require—toward forming a viable representation, that is, a representation that can transform the quantity of excitation into psychic complexity. 8 This, of course, can only be done through conflict and compromise between drive and defense, and under the influence of fixation-regression points that trace the subject’s individual profile on the basis of the specific life events and the bodily zones involved.
Fantasy-Building and Après-Coup (Nachträglichkeit)
Let me now try to answer one possible objection. If, as I have suggested, there are no well-formed fantasies located “in” the Unconscious; if, on the contrary, fantasies are indeed the end-product of an elaborative process, what about, for instance, the Kleinian fantasy of “combined parents” and the anxiety it provokes? How can the end-result of psychic elaboration be itself a source of anxiety? Is this not an argument in favor of primal fantasies conceived as a starting points rather than end-products?
The answer requires invoking the mechanism of après-coup (Nachträglichkeit) already encountered in the process of fantasy-building. As a general mechanism, après-coup is by definition a major asset in the evolution of the psychic system as a whole. In our clinical work we are indeed more at ease with cases where the complex time structure of après-coup is present than with situations of massive trauma where the raw repetition of “blows” (coups) seems to be the rule. 9 This however should not overshadow the fact that après-coup is itself the bearer of “blows” and that it can therefore play a role in the birth of pathological solutions just as much as it can work toward the reopening of evolutive and resolutive processes in the course of analysis. Après-coup can be at work in organizing a phobia—as in Freud’s patient Emma (Freud, 1895/1966)—before it can work in the service of dissolving that symptom through a number of temporal to-and-fros during the analysis. Hence, the après-coup construction of a fantasy says nothing by itself of the consequences—pathogenic or curative, provoking anxiety or reducing it—that may ensue.
This being said, we can now make explicit another important step in fantasy-building. We shall note that the resolutive effect of intuiting and analyzing a pathogenic fantasy only obtains after a supplementary cycle in the process of après-coup, i.e. when the fantasy, while not yet put into words, is nevertheless in a pre-conscious state for having borrowed its forms from the mytho-symbolic thesaurus of culture and from the bodily experience. Through these proto-verbal forms, the process can now find a road open toward conscious verbal articulation. During analysis, such articulation is made possible by being encased within the dynamics of transference. Yet, until it has become available to speech it cannot be properly called a “fantasy,” although I see no problem in calling it so in the analyst’s daily parlance. Going back to the “combined parents” fantasy (or, for that matter, to any other “primal” fantasy), it can therefore be considered, in its pathogenic effects, as a sort of unripe fruit, caught in an as yet unspeakable stage of the process of fantasy-building. As such, due to its incomplete elaboration, it is accompanied by anxiety, incapable as it is of sufficiently responding to the enigma of a scene that was given to be seen, therefore still containing a large part of the scene’s disquieting, uncanny components. For this reason, the “combined parents” fantasy does not ordinarily show up as such in consciousness and can only be inferred. But its derived actualization within the transference and the utterance in words that is thereby made possible, allows for a dissolving of the anxiety and/or of the symptom associated to it. A brief clinical example may illustrate this.
A man in his 40s, many years into analysis and without any history of pulmonary illness, began presenting, a few weeks before the summer break, a sense of respiratory oppression manifest through long sighs expressed during the sessions—and only then. The patient tried to explain away his symptom by attributing it to his position on the couch. Concurrently, the forthcoming summer holidays elicited in him memories of his childhood, about holidays spent with his parents in a “tiny cottage” where the whole family slept “crammed” in small rooms with poorly soundproofed walls. Through these associations the patient and I came to understand that, on the one hand, he was affected by the upcoming absence of the analyst and the associated feeling of being excluded from the analyst’s world; on the other hand, through his childhood memories, we could see his symptom as the bodily expression of an anxiety that may have been provoked by “respiratory noises” coming from the parents’ room through the thin cottage walls. At the time, the noises may have made him witness to a mysterious scene from which he was also excluded and about which he may have imagined a “respiratory oppression” in one parent or the other, thus giving him a comprehensible version of the enigma to which he was exposed. This verbal articulation of the fantasy was followed by the disappearance of his symptom and made possible a more detailed exploration, in the ensuing sessions, of the transferential issues provoked by the impending vacations.
The theoretical formulation of what went on in this brief analytic moment could be the following: the seductive enigma of what the patient was “given to be heard” (the noises through the thin walls) had remained encapsulated in the infantile memory as an opaque “thing,” associated to a time of vacations, when the family was “crammed” in a small place. The intense, difficult to verbalize, transferential emotions elicited by the upcoming vacation awakened the traces of the infantile scene. Unconscious desire was thus reactivated, carrying in its wake the inherent conflicted elements: to be in the same room as the parents (or the analyst) and to be exposed to something disturbing by way of its being incomprehensible and impossible to assimilate. The patient had at first been unable to find a verbal formulation for his conflictual desire so the fantasy-building was arrested halfway through; therefore, only a somatically enacted version was available. But through his “respiratory oppression” (a case of hysterical identification) and its insertion in the transferential space, the patient enrolled the analyst in the collaborative elaboration of a full fantasy. Verbalization thus completed the pre-conscious form and opened the way to a conscious grasp; moreover, this allowed for the connection of the now well-formed infantile scene to a number of other elements of the transference dynamics.
Fantasy-Building and Pathogenicity: The Imaginative Stage of Fantasy-Building
Through the preceding example I can now introduce another component of the fantasy-building, thereby giving a more detailed account of the “progress in organization” that it represents. Let me first posit that, at a sufficiently advanced stage of the process, fantasy belongs to the pre-conscious (Pcs). This is in full agreement with Freud’s idea that on the way toward consciousness a “progress toward a superior organizational stage” is achieved by adding word-presentations to thing-presentations. In other texts, such as the one already quoted (Freud, 1908/1959), Freud seems however to ascribe the pathogenic role of fantasy essentially to it being located “in” the Unconscious; but he does not clearly state how the unconscious location makes fantasy the basis and the organizer of symptoms. In this regard, I believe we can both assert that, strictly speaking, fantasy is pre-conscious and indicate under what conditions it becomes pathogenic. Going back to the clinical example above, I’d suggest that the pathogenic effect is not the result of fantasy as such, but of the insufficiently developed stage at which the fantasy-building process—triggered by the things originally heard—was arrested, a stage at which the subject had yet to come to terms with the darker side of the enigmatic and seductive scene. It is therefore not the full-fledged fantasy but a yet unelaborated “thing” which is both unconscious and potentially pathogenic by remaining enigmatic and beyond the psyche’s capacity to bind the excitation.
Let me also remark that in the case reported, the pathogenicity of the unconscious “thing” did not operate in a direct manner. (I shall mention later what a direct manifestation of the nonelaborated “thing” could be.) The symptomatic expression rather resulted from connecting what was heard with the child’s own bodily experience, as the latter results from the empathic and imitative value of perceiving a fellow human being (Freud, 1895/1966, p. 333). 10 Through this connection a first prototype of the fantasy is formed: a version still rooted in the nonverbal stratum yet sufficiently evolved as to be enacted in an already evocative form, a form that will eventually lend itself to being spoken during the analytic session. From there, a more advanced verbal articulation ensues which can be more clearly inserted in the dynamics of transference and therefore put into words (interpreted), thus depriving the “thing” of its pathogenic overexciting effects.
In a general formulation, a number of stages can be described along the trajectory followed by the fantasy-building process. Between the stage of the raw “thing” and that of the full-fledged fantasy (which could also be described as “well mentalized”) an intermediate stage is one I call imaginative, in that it employs the forms captured by perceiving external events and combining them with images born out of the subject’s own bodily experiences. A symptom such as the one presented in my clinical example can occur when the process is halted at this imaginative stage and the subject is not yet in the capacity of putting it into words. Let us remark, however, that at this stage the arrested result is already pre-conscious in that it is apt at becoming speakable. This is not unlike what happens with dream images which, ordinarily, are not accessed verbally but whose secondary revision allows for their taking a discursive and therefore potentially meaningful form.
Fantasy-Building and Psychosomatic Theory
If the conceptions here formulated are valid, they should be able to enter in a dialogue with psychosomatic theory. 11 According to this theory, “operational states” (états opératoires)—which are often harbingers of true somatic pathology—are remarkable by the “thinness” of the pre-conscious layer, with, among other things, a noticeable scarcity of fantasy life. The question one must then ask, in view of my proposed model, is at what stage has the process of fantasy-building been interrupted to result in this relative absence of fantasies?
As should be clear by now, when I said earlier that a not yet articulated fantasy, though pre-conscious, may be pathogenic, I was thinking of psychoneurotic symptoms such as the one illustrated in the clinical example. The symptom and its fantasy basis corresponded to a point of arrest on the trajectory I described; more precisely, it was arrested at the “imaginative” stage and manifested itself in a transient hysterical conversion. When stopped at this stage, the process creates a form which, though at first expressed in a bodily language, nevertheless lends itself to a verbal formulation. In other words, the symptom has at least a potential meaning even if its verbal expression has not yet been found.
As for “true” somatic pathology (actual somatic lesions affecting the physical structure of the body), no causal links but correlations can be found with “operational states” and their relative absence of fantasy life. The pathology is in itself devoid of meaning (though meaning can be secondarily attributed). Unsurprisingly, Marty equated “operational life” with a lack of psychic elaboration of traumas (Marty, 1976, p. 101ff ) Now, if indeed this is what explains the relative absence of fantasies in the pre-conscious life, then fantasies cannot be present “in” the Unconscious either. Whatever was left behind in the psyche by trauma was not subjected to a process of fantasy-building. The implanted “thing” stayed in its unelaborated state, therefore remaining totally enigmatic, which concords both with the absence of fantasy and the meaningless nature (i.e. not interpretable analytically) of true somatic pathology.
If we now articulate Marty’s conception of “operational life” with Laplanche’s theory of generalized seduction, we can posit that it is the very nature and the intensity of trauma that accounts for the abortion of the process of fantasy-building. Laplanche has described—besides, and even opposite to “ordinary” and unavoidable seduction (such as the one illustrated in my clinical example)—a violent and perverse version of seduction in which the sexual enigma does not result in “implantation” of the sexual in the “psychophysiological skin;” it rather takes the form of “intromission,” penetrating and paralyzing the process of psychic differentiation (Laplanche, 1990/1999b). It is easily imaginable how affect and fantasy-building are central among the processes of psychic differentiation that are paralyzed in this way. The concomitant paralysis of these processes, by the way, accounts even more fully for the clinical picture of “operational life,” characterized as it is not only by the scarcity of fantasies, dreams and metaphoric language (the “thinness” of the pre-conscious), but also by the poor differentiation and verbal articulation of affect (“alexithymia”). This is then how, according to the present model, the pathogenicity of the unconscious “thing” operates when it cannot be relayed by more elaborate elements formed all along the full trajectory of affect- and fantasy-building.
Fantasy-Building and “A Child Is Being Beaten”
In “A Child Is Being Beaten” (Freud, 1919/1955) describes a peculiar three-phase construction of the fantasy. In fact, the three phases are not successive steps, and in every phase fantasy is always already present, though engaged in a strange choreography. Between the first fantasy (father beats child) and the third (a child is being beaten)—both seemingly sadistic and consciously formulated fantasies—enters a second, utterly unconscious masochistic fantasy: “I am being beaten by father.”
About this second phase Freud says that it is “the most important and the most momentous of all,” yet he immediately adds, but we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account. (Freud, 1919/1955, p. 185, italics added)
This seems to support the idea proposed here that what we cursorily call an unconscious fantasy is in fact an après-coup construction and the end-product of a complex process of fantasy-building. But it must be underscored again that the phases described by Freud are not truly stages in a process; in his view, they are three full-fledged fantasies, the second of which is deemed totally unconscious, and this sends us back to the problem identified at the beginning of the present paper.
It is to be noticed that, according to the model proposed here, the first phase described by Freud refers to an observed scene (“father beats child”). A scene that is given to be seen, and therefore, in spite of its explicit aspect, sends a compromised message, in the Laplanchian sense—compromised, that is, by the unconscious Sexual of the adult (Laplanche, 2011). Such Sexual is carried over to the child not merely by the act of beating a child, but also by that of showing the scene to another child who, while not beaten herself, will eventually form the masochistic fantasy. This “given to be seen” is at once enigmatic, seductive and . . . traumatic. With the relative paralysis of the psychic processes resulting from the trauma the scene is difficult to metabolize. It must be emphasized, however, that this “given to be seen” is not yet a fantasy, and Freud himself seems to think so: One may hesitate to say whether the characteristics of a fantasy can yet be ascribed to this first step towards the later beating fantasy. It is perhaps rather the question of recollections of events which have been witnessed, or of desires which have arisen on various occasions. (Freud, 1919/1955, p. 185)
A salutary hesitation that one wishes Freud had taken seriously. Instead, he ends this passage by declaring that “these doubts have no importance” (Freud, 1919/1955). In the logic of his text, this is understandable, since between the phases he describes there is no notion of progression, no development from one stage to another, but only permutation between forms that, if not identical in nature, are at least equivalent. But if, as Freud himself seems to have transiently thought, the first phase is not already a fantasy, but an observed scene (which may have been observed or derived from other experiences, narratives or tales, etc.), then we must insist that this scene includes a message. It must be emphasized, however, that this message, emitted by the father, is really captured by the child, and that its compromised, that is, not fully comprehensible part will serve as a starting point (a “potential seed”) for the process of fantasy-building.
Indeed, despite the traumatic nature of the scene, the child seems to have managed to somewhat emerge from psychic paralysis. The third phase shows her identifying with the beaten child as well as with his aggressor, that is to say, adopting at least in part the role of the sadistic father, but stripped of his identity, and masking the enjoyed masochistic position. The scene thus becomes impersonal: “A child is beaten,” but no one knows who or by whom. . . . Fully fantasized, this scene can now be “spoken” and consciously summoned into the masturbatory act while its exciting source remains hidden.
How does Freud’s second and necessary phase fit in our fantasy-building process? We have seen that for him “I am being beaten by father” is a fantasy, though it is deemed totally unconscious and can only be interpolated between the other two phases by the work of analysis. Freud, however, ascribes the utterly unconscious character of this phase to the repression undergone by Oedipal desires. Following our present model, this second phase is indeed and will remain unconscious until it is constructed by the work of analysis; but this is so, not because of repression (or due to its intensity), but plainly because it is not yet a full-fledged fantasy; it is but a stage, a yet unspeakable form, on the way toward a fully uttered fantasy but not yet there. This “unripe” state is probably the reason why Freud seems to have doubts and hesitations about the reality of this second phase, and why he himself wonders if it is an actual fantasy. It corresponds to what I have called the imaginative stage, making use not only of images drawn from memories of childhood observations or desires, but also of images taken from another generous source: the child’s own bodily experiences. At the basis for Freud’s second phase it is reasonable to invoke that the child could readily identify herself with the one being beaten by father since, as Freud himself wrote in the Project, every perception of a fellow human being contains a value of both empathy and imitation (Freud, 1895/1966, p. 333). Moreover, also in the Project, Freud wrote that “the other can be understood by the activity of memory—that is, can be traced back to information from [the subject’s] own body” (p. 331).
When Freud writes that the fantasy “I am being beaten by father” can only be constructed or interpolated thanks to the work of analysis, he omits mentioning that in order to be constructed it must also be put into words. Now, it must be remembered that, in his own view, there are no word-presentations in the unconscious. In our present model, the capacity to put into words is precisely what allows going from the imaginative stage to the fully developed fantasy. More importantly, it is because of this “higher stage of organization” of fantasy—that is, its capacity to be spoken—that secondary repression can operate. As a result, the more disturbing aspects of the imaginative content is kept at bay all the while it is given a speakable form that is less disturbing for the ego and therefore capable of becoming conscious—in this case, the sentence “A child is being beaten.”
Repression is then what makes the fantasy in Freud’s third and final phase potentially conscious and therefore analyzable, that is, allowing analyst and patient to construct and interpolate the second phase. That this second phase can only be constructed après-coup by the work of analysis is in fact another reason why we should not call it an unconscious fantasy. Indeed, it would be, to say the least, strange that the analysis of a fully formed conscious fantasy (third phase) could only lead in the end to the discovery of another . . . fully formed fantasy, as this would contradict Freud’s general conception of the unconscious as well as his model of interpretation and analysis, as exemplified in the interpretation of dreams. If analyzing a conscious fantasy led to discovering yet another, though unconscious, fantasy, it would be as though the analysis of a dream could only lead to retrieving yet another dream behind it, and so on, in an infinite loop. The process of fantasy-building introduced here is, on the contrary, fully consistent with Freud’s original model of dream analysis.
