Fantasy and the Process of Fantasy-Building

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."