PRIMAL FANTASY; FANTASIES OF ORIGINS ORIGINS OF FANTASY1 (1964) Laplanche

Post-scriptum (1985)
This text, like all psychoanalytic texts but perhaps more than others, is dated. By dated we do not mean that, twenty years after its first publication in Les Temps Modernes, it has become outmoded or obsolete. At least we hope not, as much for todays reader as for ourselves. But, incontestably, it is time-stamped both by the circumstances of its appearance and by its internal structure. We wrote it with a sense of urgency, an urgency attributable in the first place to an act of rupture. In 1964, we had just in effect announced our refusal to follow Lacan into what would first be called lcole and would later become his cole. But, we did not allow ourselves to see that we had already separated ourselves from his thought. This can be detected in this short essay in our oscillation between audacity and prudence, an oscillation also felt in the rhythm of the writing: sometimes walking with baby steps and sometimes condensing excessively. In creating, but entirely in our own way, a return to Freud, we demonstrated our refusal to take a one-way-ticket toward Lacan. At the same time, we had not relinquished our desire to establish a continuity between Freud and Lacan. Our study is also time-stamped in another respect: it was written with the momentum of The Language of Psychoanalysis which at the time was almost finished. Certainly one could say it emerges, like that book, as a kind of exegesis, but only if by that one understands a study impregnated by a thought both sovereign and enigmatic, and not simply exploitation of existing capital. The discovery of a treasure consists of a time of astonishment before a time of inventory, followed by the necessary squandering. The richness of the Freudian thesaurus, let us remember, was barely suspected by those who, at that time, contented themselves with living on the income; that is, when they didnt deposit the treasure with a single Other to take care of pronouncing it Truth.

The title in French is Fantasme Originaire, Fantasmes des Origines, Origines du Fantasme. In the first English translation, in the IJP, this was rendered Fantasy and Origins of Sexuality, a choice which indicates what is, arguably, the most important contribution of the essay. That title sacrifices the playfulness of the original. This is a consistent choice of the first translation and, in my view, more is lost than word-play. This essay was first published in Les Temps Modernes, not a psychoanalytic journal but one for the general public. The significance of this is beyond the scope of a footnote, but gives the context for the texts style which is both conversational and learned, forthright and nuanced, playful and precise. When I see a choice between possibly confusing richness and possibly misleading clarity, I opt for the former. (See, for example, footnote number 5.) In general I have tried to retain the authors provocations and their playfulness with language. I do not believe this is simply a matter of style nor a question of accessibility and its opposite. Rather I have tried to respect what I see as the authors necessary and principled refusal, following the example of Freud, to force their notions onto the procrustean bed of academic/scientific style. [Everything in square brackets is an addition by the translator.]

First it was necessary to bring back to light concepts perfectly forgotten (forgotten from the beginning by the Freudians, that is by Freud himself) like anaclisis2 and primal fantasy. It was necessary to give back plenary value, foundational if not transcendental, to notions reduced to banalities like autoerotism, and those described and misunderstood like seduction. But soon the task became more difficult, torn between two imperatives: neither to falsify nor to schematize the thought of Freud, but to try to restore its demands, its repressions, its ambiguities, and perhaps its naivits(the phylogenetic hypothesis); and, on the other hand, to advance our own project which is to point out, between the rediscovered notions, a configuration more explicit, more coherent, more stimulating [than that spelled out by Freud]. Which means that the reader and we ourselves in rereading will detect many levels in this text: - a necessary and healthy archeology of concepts, that strives to be simultaneously faithful and critical; - a tentative interpretation of the problematic of origins, in which a stucturalist inspiration remains perceptible in spite of the denials; - the beginnings of new developments in which each of the two authors subsequently engaged more freely, each of us affirming his choice within the experimental terrain which Freud has marked out and plowed. At least we have taken the risk of reopening and unfolding in the sexual field of psychoanalysis the infantile question of origins, a question which, if it has no right of place in positivist knowledge, must haunt our thinking: that of the psychoanalyst and that of the philosopher who in this area try to walk in step. Reread today, republished without modification only chapter titles have been added, certain notes integrated into the body of the text and references made precise this essay retains for us the value of an index: the finger which points to a thing, the gesture which extends itself in a path requiring detours, the sign of a riddle and not of its solution.

[In the Standard Edition and elsewhere anaclisis has become the standard English translation of the ordinary German word anlehnung (in French tayage). Perhaps better, certainly more familiar English, would be propping up or supporting or, from the other angle, leaning on.]

I used to visit her in the evening

From its origins, psychoanalysis has brewed the material of fantasies. In the inaugural case of Anna O, Breuer seems to do nothing but immerse himself in the world of the patients imaginary productions, in her private theater, in order to permit a catharsis by way of verbalization and expression of emotion. I used to visit her in the evening, he tells us, when I knew I should find her in her hypnosis, and then I relieved her of the whole stock of imaginative products which she had accumulated since my last visit.3 Reading the history of this case, one is struck by how, in contrast to Freud, Breuer has little interest in recovering actually lived experiences that could have been the foundation of the daydreams. Already in the event which Breuer conceives of as the initiator of the neurosis, it is an imaginary element, a hallucination, which provokes the trauma. There is a circular relationship between the fantasy and the dissociation of consciousness which results in the formation of a psychical unconscious: the fantasy becomes traumatic when it occurs on the basis of a special state, called hypnoid, but inversely the fantasy, by the fright and stupefaction which it provokes, contributes to the creation of this fundamental state; thus there is autohypnosis. If Breuer put himself in an imaginary world and tried to reduce its pathogenic power without resorting to reference to anything extrinsic to that world, much the same is true in the practice of certain contemporary analysts, particularly the followers of Melanie Klein. From the start the analyst makes explicit and verbalizes the imaginary dramas which underlie the verbal or behavioral material brought in by the patient: introjection and projection of fantasy breast or penis, intrusions, struggles or compromises of good and bad objects, etc.4 The progress of the treatment, if it ends in a better adaptation to reality, is not expected to arise from any corrective method but from a dialectic in which fantasies are integrated as they are revealed; in the last analysis the stable introjection of the good object (no less imaginary than the bad object) permits a fusion of the instincts in an equilibrium based on dominance of the libido over the death instinct. In German the word fantasy (Phantasie) is the term used to designate the imagination, not so much the faculty of imagining (the philosophers Einbildungskraft) as the imaginary world and its contents: the imaginings or fantasies into which the neurotic and the poet willfully retreat. In the scenarios which the subject recounts, or which the analyst tells the analysand, the flavor of a sance is impossible to miss. Given that, how can one escape the temptation to define this world by its relation to that from which it separates itself: the world of the real? The opposition [real fantasy] long preceded psychoanalysis, and from the beginning threatened to lock up psychoanalytic theory and practice within its terms. How have psychoanalysts dealt with this in their theoretical work,? Pretty badly, and most often by relying on the crudest theories of knowledge.

3 4

Breuer, J. and Freud, S. 1895 Studies on Hysteria, S.E. II, page 30 Klein, M. 1960 Narrative of a Child Psycho-Analysis

More than any other analyst, Melanie Klein, whose technique is free of all orthopedic5 aims, has shown herself concerned to distinguish the structural function and the permanence of that which she calls unconscious phantasies6 from the contingent imagery of daydreams. Klein maintains that, in the final instance, unconscious phantasies are false perceptions. Thus, the good object and the bad object must rigorously be placed in quotation marks7 even though the entire development of the subject takes place within these quotation marks. And what about Freud? In the course of this study we will see all the ambiguity of his theorizing, and how at each turn of his thinking he found another road open. As a first approach to his thought, we take up his doctrine in its most official version. In this account, the world of fantasies seems to lie completely within the frame of the opposition of subjective and objective, between an interior world which tends to find satisfaction in illusion and an exterior world which, mediated by the perceptual system, progressively enforces the reality principle. In this classic model, the unconscious appears as the inheritor of that which originally was the subjects only world, governed by the pleasure principle alone. Thus the world of fantasies is akin to those nature reserves which civilized nations create to perpetuate the state of nature. With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is fantasying8 Unconscious processes entirely disregard reality testing; they equate reality of thought with external reality, and wishes with their fulfillment with the event.9 This absence of the standards of reality in the unconscious threatens to mark it as a lesser entity, a less differentiated state. In psychoanalytic practice any conceptual weakness will produce an effect. It is not only for clarity that it is necessary to mention all those forms of technique that, based on the opposition between the imaginary and the real, are understood as a journey toward the integration of the pleasure principle into the reality principle, a trip on which the neurotic has only gone half way. This is not to say that such forms of technique make an appeal to realities outside of the analysis; the patients materiel is analyzed in the relation of the patient to the analyst, in the transference. But, if we dont watch out, wont every interpretation of transference: You are acting with me as if insinuate: And you know very well that in reality I am not what you believe?

[The French word here is orthopdique which is as provocative in French as it is in English. The Oxford English Dictionary defines orthopedic as relating to or concerned with the cure of deformities in children or of bodily deformities in general.] 6 Further on we will discuss this distinction. 7 Good and bad objects are imagos which are a phantastically distorted picture of the real objects upon which they are based. Klein, M. [The source of this quotation is uncertain but approximately the same notion can be found in Kleins On Criminality 1934 in which she says, The small child first harbors against its parents aggressive impulses and phantasies, it then projects these on to them, and thus it comes about that it develops a phantastic and distorted picture of the people around it. But the mechanism of introjection operates at the same time, so that these unreal imagos become internalized, with the result that the child feels itself to be ruled by phantastically dangerous and cruel parents the super-ego within itself. In Love, Guilt and Reparation & Other Works 1921-1945 pages 258-259.] 8 Freud, S. 1911 Two Principles of Mental Functioning, S.E. XII, page 222. [The sentence quoted continues, which begins already in childrens play, and later, continued as day-dreaming, abandons dependence on real objects.] 9 Ibid page 225

Happily technique saves us: we refrain from saying aloud that unhappy insinuation10. Even more radically, the analytic rule must be understood as poch11, absolute suspension of all judgments of what is reality. Isnt this how we put ourselves on an equal footing with the unconscious which makes no such judgments? A patient tells us that he is an adopted child. He recounts fantasies in which, searching for his real mother, he realizes that she is society woman turned prostitute. Dont we recognize the banal theme of the family romance such as might equally well be forged by a child who hadnt been adopted? Within our phenomenonological reduction we wouldnt distinguish the two cases unless, for example, it was to denounce as a defense by reality the support that the patient found in his adoption documents. The suspension of reference to reality becomes a Its you who says so, which pushed to a derogatory limit becomes: All that is subjective.
And yet in the case of the real adoption to which we allude, the difference did emerge on the clinical level: outside the treatment, enactments, rapidly blunted, of fantasies of reunion with the mother, episodes where the attempt to rejoin the true mother was symbolically enacted in a sort of second state, etc. In the treatment itself, from the beginning, numerous elements dream contents, repeated occurrences of sleep showing in a massive fashion and acting as a regressive trend toward the origins showed the disjunction between the raw reality and speech.

Although he was haunted and who can blame him by the need to know in what region of being he found himself, Freud wasnt able to give a clear account when he had to justify suspension of reference to reality in analytic treatment. At first Freud felt almost a duty to show the patient all his cards. But captured, like the patient himself, by the alternative real-imaginary, how could he avoid the double risk either of losing the analysands interest at the beginning of treatment when the analysand learned that all his productions were only imaginings (Einbildungen), or, on the other hand, to be reproached later in the treatment for having encouraged him to take his fantasies for realities12? At this point, Freud invokes as the solution the notion psychic reality a new dimension which the analysand, at the beginning, could not grasp. But what does psychic reality mean? What does Freud comprehend in the notion? Quite often nothing more than the reality of our thoughts, of our inner world, a reality at least as valuable as that of the material world, whose effect is decisive for neurotic phenomena.13 If this is to contrast the reality of psychological phenomena with material reality, the reality of thought with external actuality14, that is only to say again: we are working within the
It is admirable to see how Melanie Klein, who interprets the transference in a continuous flow, succeeds in never raising the in reality nor even the as if. 11 A Greek word e a check or cessation; for example the epoch (e ) of a star is the point at which it seems to halt after reaching the zenith (Plutarch). 12 Freud, S. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 1917 S.E. XVI, page 368 [The patient] too wants to experience realities and despises everything that is merely imaginary. If, however, we leave him, till this piece of work is finished, in the belief that we are occupied in investigating real events of his childhood, we run the risk of his later on accusing us of being mistaken and laughing at us for our apparent credulity. It will be a long time before he can take in our proposal that we should equate phantasy and reality and not bother to begin with whether the childhood experiences under examination are the one or the other. 13 Ibid page 368 The phantasies possess psychical reality as contrasted with material reality, and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind. 14 Freud, S. 1911 Two principles S.E. XII, page 225
10

imaginary, within the subjective, but this subjective is our object; the object of psychology is as valid as those of the natural sciences. Doesnt the very term psychic reality show that Freud could only confer on psychological phenomena the dignity of being an object by reference to material reality, and by affirming that, they too possess a reality of a sort.15 The suspension of the standards of reality, in the absence of a new category, pushes us back to the reality of the purely subjective. And yet When he introduces this notion of psychic reality, in the last lines of The Interpretation of Dreams which summarize the whole thesis (a dream is not an illusion but a text to be deciphered), Freud does not define it as all the subjective, like the domain of psychology, but as a heterogeneous core in this domain, resistant, and alone truly real in contrast to most psychological phenomena: Whether we are to attribute reality to unconscious wishes, I cannot say. It must be denied, of course, to any transitional or intermediate thoughts. If we look at unconscious wishes reduced to their most fundamental and truest shape, we shall have to conclude, no doubt, that psychical reality is a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality.16 Thus there are three kinds of phenomena (or of reality in the larger sense): material reality, the reality of psychological or intermediate thoughts, the reality of unconscious desire and its truest expression (fantasy). For this psychic reality, for this new category constantly made mysterious in Freuds writing, it will not do to start out by calling it the symbolic or the structural. If Freud keeps finding and losing his own grasp on the concept, it is not only the effect of a deficiency in his conceptual tools. The relation of psychic reality to the real and to the imaginary which is to say the very structure of psychic reality leads to the difficulty and ambiguity of psychic reality as it emerges in the central domain of fantasy.
One more word about the poch, the suspension of the judgment of reality, expressed in the analytic rule: Speak everything, but do no more than speak. It is not a suspension of the reality of external events for the sake of subjective reality. The rule creates a new domain, that of speaking, in which the difference between the real and the imaginary can remain important (cf. the case of the adopted patient). The homology between the analytic domain and the domain of the unconscious (which is aroused by the former) is not based on their common subjectivity but in the profound kinship of the unconscious with the domain of speech. Its not Its you who says so, but It is you who says so.

I no longer believe in my neurotica

15 16

Freud, S. 1917 Introductory lectures S.E. XVI, page 368 S.E. V, page 620. Freuds successive rewritings of this passage in the course of successive editions of the Dream book (reviewed in the note on page 620) shows both Freuds worry about defining psychic reality and the difficulty he had doing it.

The years 1895-1899, which contain the discovery of psychoanalysis, are significant not only for the uncertainties and doubts of the struggle leading to that discovery, but also for the oversimplified way this history has classically been written. For example, if one reads Ernest Kris introduction to the Origins of Psychoanalysis17, the evolution of Freuds thinking seems perfectly clear: the facts most importantly his selfanalysis forced him to abandon his first ideas; the scene of seduction by the adult that, until then, was for Freud the essential character of psychic trauma, turned out to not to be a real event, but a fantasy which itself is the product of and the disguise of spontaneous manifestations of infantile sexuality. In writing his own account of this history, doesnt Freud confirm this point of view? If hysterical subjects trace back their symptoms to traumas that are fictitious, then the new fact which emerges is precisely that they create such scenes in fantasy, and this psychical reality requires to be taken into account alongside practical reality. This reflection was soon followed by the discovery that these fantasies were intended to cover up the autoerotic activity of the first years of childhood, to embellish it and raise it to a higher plane. And now, from behind the fantasies, the whole range of a childs sexual life came to light.18 Freud admits his error: he had at first imputed to the outside that which is an inside Theory of sexual seduction - the word alone should give us pause. This is the elaboration of an explanatory model for the etiology of the neuroses. It is not a pure clinical finding about the frequency of the occurrence of seduction of children by adults; nor is it a simple hypothesis that such seductions constitute the bulk of cases in a series of traumatic events. Freud is concerned to establish as a principle the connection he has discovered between sexuality, trauma and defense: to show that it is in the very nature of sexuality to have a traumatic effect, and, inversely, that ultimately one can not speak of trauma as at the origin of neurosis except in so far as there has been sexual seduction. When Freud maintained this thesis (in the years 1895-1897), the role of defensive conflict in the genesis of hysteria, and of the neuropsychoses of defense in general, was fully recognized without in any way reducing the etiologic function of trauma. Notions of defense and trauma are tightly connected to one another. The seduction theory, in showing how only sexual trauma has the power to launch a pathologic defense (repression), constitutes an attempt to account for the fact, discovered in clinical work (Studies on Hysteria), that repression acts specifically on sexuality. Lets stop for a moment to examine this model proposed by Freud. The effective action of trauma breaks down into several moments and always requires the existence of at least two events: 1. In a first scene called the seduction scene the child is subjected to a sexual action by an adult (an attack or simple advances), which does not call forth any sexual excitement in the child. To consider such a scene traumatic requires abandoning the somatic model of trauma: there is neither a flood of excitation
17

Especially Chapter III, Infantile Sexuality and Self-Analysis [pages 27-34 in The Origins of Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freuds letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Ed. Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris; Basic Books, 1954] 18 S. Freud, 1914, On The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, S.E. XIV, pages 17-18

from outside nor are the defenses overwhelmed. It can only be considered sexual if it is looked at externally and from the point of view of the adult. The child has neither the bodily potential for sexual excitement nor the mental representations needed to integrate the event. Sexual in itself, the event cannot have a sexual meaning for the child: it is pre-sexual sexual19. 2. The second scene occurs after puberty and is, so to speak, even more nontraumatic than the first: non-violent, seemingly insignificant, its only power lies in retroactively evoking the first event by having some features associated with it. Thus it is the evoked memory of the first scene which sets off a rise in sexual excitation, surprising the ego from behind and leaving it disarmed, in no condition to use defenses normally turned to the outer world, thus creating the need for, and possibility of, a pathological defense or posthumous primary process: the memory is repressed. At first sight, these concepts seem to have only historical interest because they appear to presuppose an innocent child without sexuality, a supposition which contradicts undeniable later findings. We do not take up these concepts simply to trace the stages of a discovery. For us, this explanatory model, which Freud called a proton pseudos, retains exemplary value in understanding the meaning of human sexuality, a value concerning the very difficulty of thinking about sexuality. Freud is, in effect, putting forth two major theorems: In the first phase, sexuality literally invades from outside, penetrating a world of childhood presumed to be innocent where it becomes encysted as a raw event without provoking a defensive reaction: the event is not in itself pathogenic. In the second phase, puberty has activated the physiological sexual awakening, unpleasure is produced and the origin of this unpleasure is sought out in the memory of the first event, an event from outside which has become an event of inside, a foreign body which now invades from within the subject. Already present in Studies on Hysteria is the idea that psychic trauma is not reducible to the effects created, once and for all, by an external event. The causal relation between the determining psychical trauma and the hysterical phenomenon is not of a kind implying that the trauma merely acts like an agent provocateur, in releasing the symptom which thereafter leads an independent existence. We must presume rather that the psychical trauma or more precisely the memory of the trauma acts like a foreign body which long after its entry must be regarded an agent that is still at work.20 This is a surprising way of resolving the question [of the nature] of trauma: is it a flow of external excitation that traumatizes the subject on the model of physical wound? Or is it, on the contrary, internal excitation a drive which, lacking an outlet, puts the subject into a state of helplessness21? Now, with the seduction theory, one can say that all trauma comes at the same time from the outside and from the inside. From the outside because it is from the other
19

Freud to Fliess, October 15, 1895: Have I revealed the great clinical secret to you, either orally or in writing? Hysteria is the consequence of a pre-sexual sexual shock. Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a pre-sexual sexual pleasure which is later transformed into [self] reproach. The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, Masson, J.M. editor, Belknap Harvard, 1985 20 S.E. II, page 6 21 This problematic is present throughout such works as Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxieties of Freud, and Ranks The Trauma of Birth.

that sexuality arrives in the subject22, from the inside because it spurts out of this internalized externality, out of this reminiscence from which, according the lovely formula, hysterics suffer, and in which we can already recognize fantasy. A seductive solution, but it may collapse as soon as one lets the meaning of each term slip: the outside toward the event and the inside toward the endogenous and the biological. Let us instead try to look at it favorably, to save what the seduction theory offers on the deepest level. It is Freuds first and only attempt to establish an intrinsic relation between repression and sexuality. (He never stopped asserting this relation23.) He finds the force of this relation not in any content but in the temporal characteristics of human sexuality which make it the privileged domain of a dialectic between the too much and the too little of the excitation, the too soon and the too late of the event: Here, indeed, the one possibility is realized of a memory having greater releasing power subsequently than had been produced by the experience corresponding to it24. Thus traumatism is composed of two moments: psychic trauma cannot be understood except as coming from something already there, the memory of the first scene. How then can we conceptualize the formation of what is already there? How did the first pre-sexual sexual scene acquire meaning for the subject? In a perspective that reduces the temporal dimension to chronology, one either falls into an infinite regression every scene becoming sexual only by evoking a prior scene without which it would have been a nothing for the subject or one stops arbitrarily at a first scene in spite of that being inconceivable. What an illusion! The dogma that the child lives in an innocent world into which sexuality is introduced from outside by a perverse adult! An illusion, or rather a myth whose nature is indicated by its contradictions: it requires us to posit a child both as before the time of sexuality, a bon sauvage, and as having a sexuality already there (at least in itself) so that it can be awakened; it requires us to reconcile an intrusion from the outside into an inside, with the idea that perhaps, before this intrusion, there was no inside; it requires us to reconcile the passivity of simply submitting to meaning imposed from the outside, with the minimum activity necessary for an experience to be received; and finally, it requires us to reconcile the indifference of innocence with the disgust that seduction is supposed to provoke. In a phrase, there is a subject before subjectivity who receives his being, his sexual being, from the outside before there is a distinction between inside and outside. Forty years later Ferenczi came back to the seduction theory and gave it an analogous importance25. His formulations are less rigorous than Freuds but they have the virtue of perfecting the myth with two essential elements: first, beyond the events, but through their mediation, a new language, the language of passion, is introduced by the adult into the infantile language of tenderness. Secondly, the language of passion is the language of desire,
It seems to me more and more that the essential point of hysteria is that it results from perversion on the part of the seducer, and more and more that heredity is seduction by the father. Freud, letter of December 6, 1896 in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, op cit page 212; and letter #52 in S.E. I, page 238-239. 23 Cf Outline of Psychoanalysis, 1938, S.E. XXIII, page 185-186 24 Draft K, S.E. I, page 221. [The passage continues, Only one thing is necessary for this: that puberty should be interpolated between the experience and its repetition in memory] 25 S. Ferenczi, Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child, 1933 in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis, pages 156-167 Karnac Books, 1994 [1955]
22

necessarily involving the forbidden, guilt and hatred; a language in which the feeling of annihilation is linked to the pleasure of orgasm. The characteristic violence of primal scene fantasies is evidence of the childs introjection of adult erotism.
From the beginning Freud rejected the banal thesis which attributes displeasure provoked by sexuality to an external prohibition. Whether of internal or external origin, desire and the forbidden march in step: We shall be plunged deep into psychological riddles if we enquire into the origin of the unpleasure which seems to be released by premature sexual stimulation and without which, after all, a repression can not be explained. The most plausible answer will appeal to the fact that shame and morality are the repressing forces and that the neighborhood in which the sexual organs are naturally placed must inevitably arouse disgust along with sexual experiences. I do not think that the release of unpleasure during sexual experiences is the consequence of the chance admixture of certain unpleasurable factors. In my opinion there must be an independent source for the release of unpleasure in sexual life: once that source is present, it can activate sensations of disgust, lend force to morality, and so on.26

Just like Freud in 1895, Ferenczi is forced to place this intrusion chronologically and to posit a child before seduction. From an opposite stance, one is tempted to finish with the question once and for all by invoking the dimension of myth: seduction would be a myth, a myth of the origin of sexuality by the introjection of desire, of fantasy, of the language of adults. The relation of myth to time (to events), is mentioned in the myth itself and contained within it. But how can we stop there? The myth (or fantasy) of the intrusion of fantasy (or myth) in the subject must have happened within a time available to this organism, this little man, limited by the characteristics of his biological ontology in which we can already read the too much and the too little, the too soon (birth) and the too late (puberty). In the year 1897, Freud renounced his seduction theory. On September 21st he wrote to Fliess: And now I want to confide in you immediately the great secret that has been slowly dawning on me in the last few months. I no longer believe in my neurotica. He makes a number of arguments. Arguments of fact: the impossibility of bringing an analysis to a conclusion, of discovering the first pathogenic event; even in the most severe psychoses states in which the unconscious seemed most accessible the enigma did not betray its secret. Arguments of logic: it was necessary to assume the perversion of fathers far beyond the numbers of cases of hysteria because the etiology of hysteria required additional factors. Additionally, and this is primarily what interests us, there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between the truth and fiction that is invested with affect. Two potential solutions are mentioned: 1. infantile fantasies are only the retroactive effect of a reconstruction created by the adult (later the Jungian notion of retrospective fantasies Zurckphantasieren which Freud rejected from the beginning); 2. going back to the idea of a hereditary predisposition. If this second possibility which Freud admitted he had always repressed again looks plausible, it is because looking for a first event has led to an impasse; and it is also because Freud, who in this moment was floundering, could not disentangle what was positive in the seduction theory from the realism of datable events. If the event disappears, the other alternative constitution is rehabilitated. Because reality crumbles and reveals itself as only fiction, we have to look elsewhere for a reality which leads to this fiction.
26

Draft K, S.E. I, page 221-222

When the historians of psychoanalysis, picking up the official line of Freud himself, say to us that Freud, by facing facts and abandoning the seduction theory, cleared the ground for the discovery of infantile sexuality, they are simplifying a much more ambiguous evolution. For a contemporary psychoanalyst, for a Kris as for us, infantile sexuality is inseparable from the Oedipus complex. It is clear that, in the same period as the abandonment of the seduction theory, three themes become prominent in the correspondence with Fliess: infantile sexuality, fantasy, Oedipus. But the real question is how these themes connect with each other. So, what do we see? To the degree that real trauma and the scene of seduction have been cleared away27, it is not Oedipus which takes their place but rather a description of spontaneous, endogenously developing infantile sexuality. Stages of evolution, fixation conceived as inhibition of development, genetic regression constitute at least one of the perspectives contained in Three Essays on Sexuality. The second chapter, Infantile Sexuality, takes up neither the Oedipus complex nor fantasy. An article that came out at the time of the first edition of Three Essays reflects this point of view: in it Freud can speak of his Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses without mentioning the Oedipus complex. Sexual development of the infant is defined as endogenous, determined by the sexual constitution: Accidental influences derived from experience having thus receded into the background, the factors of constitution and heredity necessarily gained the upper hand once more; but there was this difference between my views and those prevailing in other quarters, that on my theory the sexual constitution took the place of a general neuropathic disposition28. Yet, one could point out that it was also in 1897, precisely when he abandoned the seduction theory, that Freud, in his self-analysis, discovered the Oedipus complex. Let us reflect on this: in Freuds writings, during a twenty year period, in spite of an importance which was recognized from the start, the Oedipus complex would have a marginal existence in theoretical syntheses; for example, in Three Essays it would be deliberately isolated in a section on the choice of objects at puberty and in the Interpretation of Dreams put into the part on typical dreams. In our understanding, the discovery of the Oedipus conflict in 1897 was neither the cause of the abandonment of the seduction theory nor that which took its place. It is more likely that having been arrived at in a raw form in the seduction theory, the Oedipus complex just missed being abandoned along with it and replaced by biological realism. Much later, Freud himself recognized what was positive and precocious in the seduction theory: e.g. in 1925, I had stumbled for the first time upon the Oedipus complex29, and in 1938: I came to understand that hysterical symptoms are derived from fantasies and not from real occurrences. It was only later that I was able to recognize in this fantasy of being seduced by the father, the expression in a woman of the typical Oedipus complex,30 (and no longer: the expression of the childs spontaneous, biological, sexual activity.) -------------27

It would be easy to demonstrate that throughout his life Freud continued to emphasize the reality of real episodes of seduction. 28 S.E. VII, page 275-276 29 An Autobiographical Study, S.E. XX, page 34 30 New Introductory Lectures, S.E. XXII,

While discovering the fact that the sexual drive became active before puberty Freud lost the notion of a foreign body that introduces the mark of human sexuality from the inside, and was, for a certain period, unable to connect the Oedipus complex with infantile sexuality. In this period, if infantile sexuality existed as observation and clinical work undeniably demonstrated it could only be conceptualized as a biological reality, and thus fantasy became only a secondary expression of this biological reality. The scene in which the subject describes himself as seduced by an older child is doubly disguised: a pure fantasy is converted into a memory of a real event, and a spontaneous, sexual activity is parodied as a scene of passivity31. At this point, there is scarcely any basis to see fantasy as psychic reality psychic reality, that is, in the rigorous sense which Freud sometimes gives to the term because the reality is as a whole attributed to endogenous sexuality of which fantasies can only be an imaginary efflorescence. With the abandonment of the seduction theory, something was lost: the conjunction and the temporal play between the two scenes had created a pre-subjective structure beyond both the internal imagery and the specific event. Prisoner of a series of conceptual alternatives: subject-object, constitution-event, internal-external, imaginary-real, for a time Freud was led to give weight to the first terms in these pairs of opposites. We have arrived at the following paradox: at the very moment the essential object of psychoanalysis, fantasy, is discovered, it risks seeing its fundamental substance replaced by endogenous reality, sexuality, itself in the grip a prohibitory, normative, external reality that imposes disguises. We still have fantasy in the sense of imaginary production, but we have lost the structure. With the seduction theory, we had, if not the elaboration of, at least the intuition of the structure (seduction appearing as a universal given, which transcends the event and, so to speak, the actors), but fantasys creative powers were unknown, or at least underestimated.

I read prehistory and the like

It would be a blinkered account to limit the evolution of Freuds thinking around 1897 to this: from the historical foundation of the symptom to an ultimately biologic theory involving the causal sequence: sexual constitution fantasy symptom. Freud never adopts such a theoretical account except when he is forced to present his views on etiology systematically. If one were to detail, step by step, the history of Freuds thinking (which we do not do here), it would be necessary to point out at least two additional currents in this central period. One of the other currents draws its influence from the new discovery about fantasy that is at work from 1896 on: fantasy is not only material to analyze either seen immediately as a fiction (like day dreams) or what, contrary to appearance, turns out to be constructed (like screen memories); but fantasy is also the result of analysis, an end, a latent content behind the symptom which is brought to light. From mnemic symbol of trauma, the symptom becomes the

31

I have learned to explain a number of phantasies of seduction as attempts at fending off memories of the subjects own sexual activity (infantile masturbation). In My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses, S.E. VII, page 274

staging of fantasies32 (e.g. a fantasy of prostitution, of street walking, could be found behind the symptom of agoraphobia.) Freud begins to explore the domain of these fantasies by making an inventory, by describing the most typical forms. Observed at the same time from two angles, as manifest content and as latent content, at the intersection of two opposing approaches, fantasy acquires in practice the stability of an object, the specific object of psychoanalysis. From here on, analysis will live with fantasy as psychic reality, exploring its variations and, above all, analyzing its process and structure. Between 1897 and 1906 Freud published all the great works which disentangle the mechanisms of the Unconscious, that is to say the transformations (in the sense the term is used in geometry) of fantasy: The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. But, and this is our third current, there was from the beginning in the trajectory of Freuds research and of his psychoanalytic treatment a regressive tendency toward the origin, toward the foundation of the symptom and the organization of neurotic character. To see fantasy as an autonomous domain, stable, explorable, is to leave aside the question of its own origin, not only the origin of its structure, but the origin of its contents in the most concrete detail. In this sense, nothing has changed, and the chronological quest, the going-back-in-time to the first, real, verifiable elements, continues to orient Freuds practice. Speaking of one of his patients, he writes in 1899: Buried deep beneath all his fantasies, we found a scene from his primal period (before twenty-two months) which meets all the requirements and in which all the remaining puzzles converge33. And, a little later, these lines in which he admits his consuming passion to pursue his investigations ever further with the certainty of ending up using the evidence of a third party if necessary with verification of the correctness of the investigation: In the evenings I read prehistory and the like, without any serious purpose34 In Es case, the second genuine scene is coming up after years of preparation; and it is one which may perhaps be confirmed objectively by asking his elder sister. Behind it a third, long-suspected scene approaches.35 Freud calls these scenes from the earliest period, these true scenes, Urszenen (original or primal scenes). Later, as we know, this term will be limited to the childs observation of parental coitus. We refer to the discussion in The Wolfman36 of the relationship between the pathogenic dream and the primal scene on which it was based. Reading the first version of the clinical work, written in the winter of 1914/15 shortly after the end of the treatment, one is struck by the passionate conviction which drives Freud, like a detective on the trail, to establish the reality of the scene by reconstructing it in detail. If such a concern can be present so long after the abandonment of the seduction theory, isnt it proof that Freud never resigned himself to accepting the scenes as purely imaginative creations. The question which was strangulated as to the scene of seduction, returns twenty years later in identical terms for the parental coitus
32 33

mise en scne de fantasmes Letter of December 21, 1899, Complete Letters, page 391 34 Emphasis added by us. 35 Freud to Fliess, January 8, 1900, Complete Letters, page 395 36 From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, 1918 [1914], S.E. XVII

observed by the Wolfman. For Freud, the discovery of infantile sexuality did not diminish the fundamental schema that underpins the seduction theory: the same process of effectiveness after the fact [aprs coup37 ] is constantly invoked. We rediscover the two events (here the scene and the dream) separated in time, the first remaining not understood, excluded within the subject, and waiting to be elaborated at a later time. That this whole process is shifted to the years of infancy changes nothing essential in the theoretical model.
(There is an evident resemblance between Freudian aprs coup (Nachtraglichkeit) and the notion of foreclosure or repudiation a psychotic mechanism elaborated by Lacan: that which had not been admitted to the symbolic order (which had been foreclosed or repudiated) reappears in the real (in the form of an hallucination) But, this non-symbolization is precisely the first stage described by Freud. As both Lacan and Freud illustrate their theory by the case of the Wolfman, one could ask if Lacan considers specifically psychotic what is, in reality, a very general process, or ask if Freud didnt take the exception for the rule, basing his demonstration on a case that turns out to be one of psychosis.) (As it happens, Freuds demonstration is strengthened by the probable reality of the primal scene in this case. But one could imagine that the absence of subjective elaboration or symbolization, characteristic of the first stage, is not the fate of a scene actually lived. This foreign body, that will be excluded in the interior, is generally brought to the subject not by the perception of a scene but by parental desire with its underlying fantasies. This would be the typical neurotic: in a first stage (a time which can not be situated precisely because it is fragmented in a series of moments of auto-erotism (see below p. 26 ff). A pre-symbolic symbolic (to paraphrase Freud) is created and isolated within the subject. In the second stage, this is taken up aprs coup and symbolized by the subject. In psychosis, in the first stage it would be raw reality that is imposed, evidently not symbolized by the subject, but also having a irreducible nucleus resistant to all subsequent attempts at symbolization. Thus in psychoses, the failure, with its catastrophic character, of the second stage.) (This approach shows the distinction between primary repression and the psychotic mechanism that Freud tried to mark out throughout his work particularly by calling the later Verleugnung, denial and which Lacan named foreclusion.)

It is well known that, in 1917, before publishing his Wolfman manuscript, Freud added two long discussions that show he had been shaken up by Jungs theory of retrospective fantasy (Zurckphantasieren). He admits that since the analysis results in a reconstruction, the scene could well have been constructed by the subject himself, but he nevertheless insists that perception at least supplied significant elements, if only the sight of dogs copulating. Most importantly, at the very moment when Freud seems about to give up on support from the ground of reality which crumbles on investigation he introduces a new notion, that of Urphantasien, primal fantasies38. Here we are present for a real mutation of the need for a theoretical foundation. Because it has become impossible to determine for the primal scene if we
37

[The problem of translating aprs coup, like the problem of translating Nachtrglichkeit has not had a happy solution in English. Usually it is rendered by the misleading, or at least one-sided, deferred action and sometimes by the better, if awkward, retrospective modification. Laplanche has suggested afterwardsness which has many delights but would not do in this context unless it already had been established in common usage as the name of this concept. (See Notes on Afterwardsness in Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, Drives, 1992 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; pages 217-223 ] 38 Urszene Urphantasie: have the same prefix Ur. It is found again in other Freudian terms, notably Urverdraangung [primal or primary repression]. [In this footnote, L&P discuss the problems of translation into French and why they chose not to use a single French word for the German Ur. ]

are dealing with an lived event or a fiction, it is necessary to find a new foundation for fantasy which transcends both experience and fantasy. For us also, it is only aprs coup that the meaning of the change in Freuds thinking in 1897 becomes clear. Seemingly nothing has changed: the same search for a truly first scene continues, the same schema is there, that of a dialectic between two successive historical events, the same disappointment as if Freud had learned nothing at the escape of ultimate event: the first scene. But in what we have called the second current, the discovery of the unconscious as a structured domain, which can be reconstructed because it is itself an arrangement of elements decomposed and recomposed according to certain laws, we have a domain that will permit the search for origins to unfold in a new dimension. The concept of primal fantasies39 has joined Freuds desire to find the bedrock of the event (it disappears in the history of the individual as a consequence of being refracted and reduced, going back ever further) and the need to base the structure of fantasy on something other than the event.

Ur
Primal fantasies constitute the store of unconscious fantasies of all neurotics, and probably of all human beings40. These words alone suggest that it is not only their empirical frequency that characterizes them. If the same fantasies with the same content are created on every occasion41, if we can find, under the diversity of individual fables, several typical42 fantasies, it is because the individuals historical experience is not the prime mover. One must posit something antecedent to the individuals historical experience which is capable of serving as an organizer. To provide such an antecedent organizer, Freud saw only one possibility: a phylogenetic explanation. It seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as fantasy the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather castration itself) were once real occurrences in the primeval time of the human family, and that children in their fantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.43 Thus here again is a real postulated behind fantasy elaborations, but a real that has an autonomous and structuralizing relation to the subject who is completely dependent on it. Freud emphasizes this, for instance,

39

When we speak of the concept we could be accused of the sin of excess. It is true that primal fantasy is not a part of the classical conceptual apparatus of psychoanalysis. Freud only invokes it in context of the issue whose development we have tried to unpack. The phrase, thus, has the value of a sign, and by this fact calls out for interpretation. 40 A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease, 1915, S.E. XIV, page 269 41 Introductory Lectures, S.E. XVI, page 370 42 A concern of Freuds from very early on. Cf. Draft M: There is the soundest hope that it will be possible to determine the number and kind of fantasies just as it is possible with scenes. Complete Letters, page 248 43 Introductory Lectures, S.E. XVI, page 371

when he points to the possibility of psychic conflict when there is discord between the schema and individual experience.44 It is tempting to see this reality, which shapes the play of imagination and imposes its law on it, as an anticipation of the symbolic order as defined by Levi-Strauss and Lacan who demonstrate its organizing power in ethnology and in psychoanalysis respectively. For Freud, these scenes are carried down from the prehistory of man, whose progress Freud traces in Totem and Taboo and which he attributes to primal man (Urmensch) and to the primal father (Urvater). Freud invoked these scenes less to recover a reality which had escaped him on the level of individual history, than to delimit the imaginary which otherwise would not know how to understand in itself its own principle of organization, and thus would not constitute the nucleus of the Unconscious. Under the pseudo-scientific mask of phylogenesis, in the appeal to inherited memory traces, we should recognize Freuds conceptual need to postulate a meaningful organization antecedent to the effect of the events and to their significance as a whole. In this mythical prehistory of the species there is the need for a pre-structure inaccessible to the subject, escaping his initiatives, escaping his inner kitchen (however rich the ingredients our new sorcerers can imagine). But Freud is caught in the trap of his own concepts. Even in this false synthesis in which the past of the human species is preserved in hereditary schemas, he re-encounters the opposition he sought to evade, between the event and constitution. Thats the way it is. But lets not rush to replace this phylogenetic explanation with an interpretation along structuralist lines. Primal fantasy is outside of the history of the subject but still within history, it is a language and a symbolic chain but still impregnated with the imaginary, it is a structure but activated by contingent elements. First of all, primal fantasy is a fantasy and, as such, is marked by traits which make it difficulty to assimilate to a purely transcendental scheme, even if it defines for lived experience the limits of what is possible.
(A coherent psychoanalytic theory requires what we do not attempt here: an account of the relation between the level of Oedipal structure and that of primal fantasies. First it would be necessary to be precise about what is meant by the Oedipal structure. The structural aspect of the Oedipus complex considered both in its inaugural function and in its triangular form was only cleared up by Freud much later, for example, it is completely absent in 1905 in Three Essays. What is called the complete Oedipus only appears in 1923 in The Ego and the Id and the completeness in question can not be understood in a formalist sense: it points to a limited series of concrete positions within the interpsychologic domain created by the father-mother-child triangle. From the perspective of structural anthropology, one can detect one of the modalities of the law governing exchange between humans, a law susceptible, in other cultures, of being incarnated in other persons and other forms. For instance, the prohibitive function of the law could be embodied in someone other than the father. If, as psychoanalysts, we accept this solution, we would lose a fundamental dimension of our experience: the subject would be put in a
44

Wherever experiences fail to fit in with the hereditary schema, they become remodeled in the imagination It is precisely such cases that are calculated to convince us of the independent existence of the schema. We are often able to see the schema triumphing over the experience of the individual; as when in our present case the boys father became the castrator and the menace of his infantile sexuality in spite of what was in other respects an inverted Oedipus complex The contradictions between experience and the schema seem to supply the conflicts of childhood with an abundance of material. Op Cit [Wolfman] S.E. XVII, page 119-120.

structure of exchange, but it would transmitted to him by the unconscious of the parents, and thus be less able to be assimilated to a language system than to the particular details of a speech.) (In fact, Freuds conceptualization of Oedipus is marked by realism: whether represented as an internal conflict the nuclear conflict or as a social institution, the complex remains a given which the subject encounters, Every new arrival on this planet is faced by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex45) (Maybe it was this realist conception that allowed Freud to permit the coexistence of the Oedipus complex and concept of primal fantasies without being concerned about how they fit together. With primal fantasy, the subject doesnt encounter structure, the subject is carried by it and, we repeat, to the interior of the fantasy to knowledge of a configuration of unconscious desires.)

The text in which Freud mentions Urphantasien for the first time, leaves no doubt about this . It takes up the case of a paranoid woman who says she had been observed and photographed while she was lying next to her lover; she had heard a noise, the click of a camera. Behind this delusion, Freud finds a primal scene: the noise is the noise of parents who wake up the child and also the sound the child is afraid to make lest it betray that she is listening. How can we understand the role of the noise in the fantasy. In one sense, Freud says, it is only a provoking factor, an accidental cause; it only activated the typical fantasy of overhearing which is a component of the parental complex; but, he immediately corrects himself, It is doubtful whether we can rightly call the noise accidental. such noises are an indispensable part of the fantasy of listening.47 In effect, the noise invoked by the patient48 reproduces in the present, the sign of the primal fantasy, the element from which the all the subsequent elaboration of fantasy can begin. In other words, the origin of the fantasy is integrated into the very structure of the primal fantasy.
46

From his earliest theorizing about fantasy, in drafts sent to Fliess, Freud emphasizes the role of hearing49. Without giving too much weight to these fragmentary texts in which Freud mostly seems to have in mind paranoid fantasies, one must still ask why this privileging of the heard? In our opinion, there are two possible motives. One concerns the particular perceptual system involved: at the moment when something is heard, it ruptures the continuity of an undifferentiated perceptual field and, at the same time, creates a sign (the noise watched for and perceived in the night), putting the subject in the position having to respond. To that degree, the prototype of the signifier belongs to the heard, even if it finds similarities in other sensory modalities. But the heard is also the past this is the second motive, to which Freud refers explicitly in the passage in question. The past or the legends of parents, and of grandparents, of ancestors: the sayings and the sounds of the family, this spoken or secret discourse, existing before the subject, where he must exist and find his way. To the extent that it retroactively
Three Essays, S.E. VII, page 226n [footnote added in 1920] A Case of Paranoia, 1915, S.E. XIV 47 Ibid, page 269 48 The noise, according to Freud, is a projection. A pulsation in the clitoris transformed and projected as a noise. The pulsation of the drive [La pulsation de la pulsion] would be a play of words evoking a new circular relationship between the pulsation which actualizes the fantasy and the drive [pulsion] which arouses it. 49 They are made up of things that are heard, and made use of subsequently; thus they combine things that have been experienced and things that have been heard, past events (from the history of parents and ancestors) and things that have been seen by oneself. They are related to things heard, as dreams are related to things seen. Draft L, S.E. I, page 248; and also, Fantasies arise from an unconscious combination of things experienced and heard. Draft M, S.E. I, page 252
46 45

summons up the discourse, the little noise will like all other discrete sensory elements that can function as indicator take on the meaning of the discourse. In their themes (primal scene, castration, seduction ), primal fantasies point toward a postulated retroactivity: they go back to origins. Like myths, they seem to bring a picture and a solution to that which appears to the child as a major enigma; they dramatize as moments of emergence, as the beginning of a story, that which appears to the subject as a reality of nature that demands an explanation, a theory. Consider the primal fantasies one by one: in the primal scene, it is the origin of the individual that is depicted; in fantasies of seduction, it is the origin of, the arousal of, sexuality; in fantasies of castration, it is the origin of sexual difference. Thus one finds in their theme, doubly signified, the quality of being already there. There is a convergence of theme, structure and, no doubt, function: in the indication provided by the perceptual domain, in the constructed scenario, in the search for beginnings, what emerges on the scene of fantasy is that which originates the subject himself.
(If we ask ourselves what these fantasies mean for us, we would start at another level of interpretation. They are not only part of the symbolic order, but, through the mediation of an imaginary scenario, they translate the insertion of the most radically inaugural symbolic into the reality of the body. For us what does the primal scene represent? The conjunction between the biological fact of conception (and of birth) and the symbolic fact of filiation, the conjunction between savage act of coitus and the existence of the mother-child-father triad. In the fantasies of castration the conjunction of the real and the symbolic is even more evident. As for seduction, we believe we have shown, Freud could theorize fantasy not only because he came upon many real cases of seduction discovering by this detour, the function of fantasy; but also because he tried to understand, in terms of origins, the way in which sexuality comes to the human being.)

A scenario with multiple entries

Fantasy is found on the most diverse levels of psychoanalytic experience: as a datum, as the substance of an interpretation, as a reconstruction, as a hypothesis. Thus the question of its metapsychological status is difficult. First of all there is the question of its location in the topographic frame which distinguishes the systems unconscious and conscious/preconscious. In certain tendencies of contemporary psychoanalysis there has been an attempt to decide the question by transposing into theory the distinction that seems necessary clinically between the fantasy as it is given by the analysand to be interpreted, and the fantasy which is the end result of psychoanalytic interpretation. (Cf. especially Susan Isaacs50) For these analysts, Freud was wrong in using one term, Phantasie, for two completely distinct realities: unconscious Phantasie, on the one hand which is the primary content of unconscious mental processes51 and, on the other hand, the conscious imaginings or sublimations like daydreams. The latter is only a manifest content like any other; it does not have any closer relation to unconscious Phantasie than do dreams, actions, and what in a general fashion we call material: like all
50 51

The Nature and Function of Phantasy, IJP #29 Ibid, page

manifest data, it would be interpreted in terms of unconscious Phantasie. To get rid of this unhappy confusion, they propose to distinguish by different spellings conscious fantasies like daydreams from unconscious phantasies. This is sometimes presented as great progress, the result of half a century of psychoanalysis. Let us try to compare this progress to the progression and inspiration of Freuds thought. Inspiration of Freuds thought: by his insistently using the same term, Phantasie, to the very end of his work, in spite of the discovery that occurred quite early that these Phantasiens could be unconscious as well as conscious, Freud testifies to a profound relation: The contents of the clearly conscious fantasies of perverts (which in favorable circumstances can be transformed into manifest behavior), of the delusional fears of paranoics (which are projected in a hostile sense onto other people) and of the unconscious fantasies of hysterics (which psychoanalysis reveals behind their symptoms) all of these coincide with one another even down to their details.52 This is to say that in imaginative formations and in psychopathologic structures as diverse as those Freud mentions in this passage, the same content, the same arrangement can be found regardless whether it is conscious or unconscious, acted out or represented, or whether there has been a change of sign [e.g. love into hate] or permutation of person [e.g. subject and object.] Such an affirmation (1905) is not from some proto-Freud. It is a central aspect of his thinking in the period 1906-1909 when fantasy was the subject of much of his work53. In this period, the power of unconscious fantasy is plainly recognized, for example, in the hysterical attack that symbolizes it. However, Freud begins with conscious fantasy, with daydream; he treats conscious fantasy not merely as paradigm but as source. Freud says, hysterical fantasies have important connections with the causation of the neurotic symptoms (which must refer to unconscious fantasies) and says, A common source and normal prototype of all these creations of fantasy is to be found in what are called the day-dreams of youth.54 A common source? Basically the conscious fantasy itself can be repressed and thus become pathogenic. Freud even finds in fantasy the privileged moment when one can see in vivo the mechanism of passage from one system to another, repression or the return of the repressed.55 It is the same mixed entity, the same mixed blood that, close to the boundary of the unconscious, can pass from one side to the other largely as a function of variation in the amount of investment.56 One might object that at such points, Freud is not dealing with unconscious fantasy at the deepest level, that he is not grappling with phantasy but with a simple, sublimated daydream. However, Freud clearly designates as repression the process which pushes back the fantasy, and the boundary of which he speaks is that of the Unconscious in the precise, topographic, sense of the term.
52 53

Three Essays on Sexuality, S.E. VII, page 165-166n Gradiva, 1907. Creative Writers and Daydreaming, 1908. Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality, 1908. Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks, 1909. Family Romances, 1909 54 Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality, S.E. IX, page 159 55 In favorable circumstances, the subject can still capture an unconscious fantasy of this sort in consciousness. After I had drawn the attention of one of my patients to her fantasies, she told me that on one occasion she had suddenly found herself in tears in the street and that, rapidly considering what it was she was actually crying about, she had got hold of a fantasy to the following effect. In her imagination she had formed at tender attachment to a pianist who was well known in town (though she was not personally acquainted with him); she had had a child by him (she was in fact childless); and he had then deserted her and her child and left them in poverty. It was at this point in her romance that she had burst into tears. Ibid, page 160 56 They draw near to consciousness and remain undisturbed so long as they do not have an intense cathexis, but as soon as they exceed a certain height of cathexis they are thrust back. The Unconscious, S.E. XIV, page 191

We certainly dont deny that there are different levels of unconscious fantasies but it is striking that Freud, studying the metapsychology of dreams, finds the same relationship between the deepest unconscious fantasies and daydreams: in the dream work, fantasy is present at both ends of the process. At one end, it is linked to the ultimate unconscious desire, the capitalist of the dream, and in that role is at the origin of the zigzag journey that the excitation is supposed to travel across a succession of psychic systems: The first portion (of the zigzag journey) was a progressive one, leading from the unconscious scenes or fantasies to the preconscious;57 where it recruits the days residues or transference thoughts. But fantasy is also present at the other end of the dream, in the secondary revision which Freud underlines even though it is not part of the dream work but must be identified with the work of our waking thought. The secondary revision is a reworking a posteriori that is accomplished, moreover, in the transformations we make to the dream story, after we have woken up. It consists essentially in adding to the raw product delivered by the unconscious mechanisms (displacement, condensation and symbolization) a minimum of order and coherence, in plating this irregular heap with a faade, a scenario that makes it relatively coherent and continuous. In a word, it makes the dreams final version look something like a daydream58. The secondary revision also uses the fully formed scenarios, fantasies and daydreams which the subject created for himself on the day before the dream. Is this to say that there is no privileged relationship between the phantasy that is at the heart of the dream and the fantasy which helps to make it acceptable to the [system] conscious? Full of his discovery that the dream is the fulfillment of an unconscious desire, it is natural for Freud to devalue everything close to consciousness which could appear as defense or as camouflage, including secondary revision59. But he quickly returns to a different understanding: It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that these dream-facades are nothing other than mistaken and somewhat arbitrary revisions of the dream-content by the conscious agency of our mental life. The wishful fantasies revealed by analysis in our nightdreams often turn out to be repetitions or modified versions of scenes from infancy; thus in some cases the faade of the dream directly reveals the dreams actual nucleus, distorted by an admixture of other material.60 Thus the two ends of the dream, and the two modes of fantasy here seem to resemble if not to merge with each other, at least they have an internal communication and symbolize each other. We have spoke of a progression in Freuds thinking on the metapsychological status of fantasy. It certainly moves in the direction of a differentiation but, as we believe we have clearly
Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. V, page 574 Ibid, page 490-491 59 Of course one must undo the effect of the secondary revision in order to take up the dream element by element. But Freud does not forget that in putting everything on the same level which is one aspects of analytic listening the [narrative] structure, the scenario itself, becomes an element, exactly like, for example, the overall reaction of the subject to his own dream. 60 On Dreams, S.E. V, page 667. In a general fashion, Freud also seems to indicate that desire can be more easily read in the structure of a fantasy than in the structure of a dream (unless the dream has been powerfully structured by the fantasy as is especially true of typical dreams: If we examine their structure [fantasies], we shall perceive the way in which the wishful purpose that is at work in their production has mixed up the material on which they are built, has rearranged it and has formed it into a new whole. Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. V, page 492
58 57

demonstrated, differentiated without suppressing the homology that exists between fantasy at different levels and, above all, without making the major line of differentiation coincide with the topographic barrier (the censorship) which separates the Preconscious-Conscious on one side from the Unconscious on the other. The key difference occurs within the Unconscious: Unconscious fantasies either have been unconscious all along having been formed in the unconscious; or as is more often the case they were once conscious fantasies, day-dreams, and have since been purposely forgotten and have become unconscious through repression.61 A little later this distinction will coincide in Freuds terminology with the distinction between primal fantasies and other fantasies unconscious or not which could be called secondary fantasies62. Beyond this fundamental difference, the unity of fantasy as a whole resides in their having the character of mixed entities in which are found, to varying degree, the structural and imaginary. It is in this sense that Freud always takes the day dream as his model of fantasy, that kind of dime novel, both stereotypic and infinitely variable, that the subject creates and recounts to himself while awake. A play of images, the day-dream uses the colorful hodge-podge of individual experience, but also the primal fantasy whose dramatis personae, the face cards of the deck, get their regalia from a family legend mutilated, turned upside down and misunderstood. The structure of the day-dream is like that of the primal fantasy in which one can easily see the oedipal configuration, for in the day-dream analysis finds under the variability of the tales, typical, repetitive scenarios. Nevertheless, it is not only, not even essentially, the variable and inverse proportion of imaginary ingredients and structural bonds that permit classification and differentiation of the modes of fantasy63 in a spectrum between the poles of primal fantasy and day-dream. The structure itself seems to vary. At the daydream pole, the scenario is essentially in the first person, the place of the subject in clear and invariable. The organization is stabilized by secondary process, and by the ego: the subject, it is said, lives out his dream. On the contrary, at the other pole, primal fantasy is characterized by an absence of subjectivization going hand and hand with the presence of the subject in the scene. For example, the child is one of the characters, among others, in the fantasy a child is being beaten. In this sense primal fantasy

61 62

Hysterical Phantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality, S.E. IX, page 161 We propose the following table: Urphantasie Phantasie (secondary) unconscious (repressed) | | conscious (day-dream)

(unconscious original)

The repression which returns secondary fantasies into the Unconscious would be that which Freud calls secondary repression or after-pressure (refoulement aprs coup). The formation or the inscription of primal fantasies within the individual corresponds to another type of repression, more obscure and more mythical, that Freud names primal repression (Urverdrngung). Below we try to point out an approach to this. Cf. also J. Laplanche and S. Leclaire, LInconscient, Une tude psychanalytique, in Les Temps Modernes, July 1961. 63 In which number one must include screen memories and the sexual theories of children.

has a close relation to screen memory, for which Freud laid particular stress this visualization of the subject at the same level as the other protagonists64. A father seduces a daughter, such, for example, would be the summary formulation of the fantasy of seduction. Here, the mark of primary process is not in the absence of organization, but the peculiar character of the structure: it is a scenario with multiple entries, in which nothing indicates that the subject finds her place in the term daughter; it could equally well be in the term father or even the term seduces.

The moment of auto: origin of sexuality

When Freud asked himself whether there was anything in man comparable to instinct in animals65, it was not in the drives (Triebe) that he found an equivalence, but precisely in primal fantasies66. This is a precious clue, first as it provides indirect proof of his repugnance at the notion of finding a solution to the problem of fantasy in a biological hypothesis: far from trying to base fantasy on the drives, Freud would rather make the play of drives depend on antecedent fantasy structures. It is precious also as it helps to situate certain contemporary concepts. Finally, it leads us to question ourselves on the tight relation, seen in the term Wunschphantasie67, between fantasy and desire. Susan Isaacs, for example, says primal fantasies are an activity parallel to drives from which they emerge. She sees in them the psychic expression of experience itself defined by the field of forces created by the drives libidinal and aggressive and the defenses they provoke. Finally she wants to make a tight link between specific forms of fantasy life and bodily zones that are the seat of the drives. Thus she is led to misunderstand part of Freuds contribution to question of drives and the question of fantasy. For her, fantasy is only the imaginary transcription of the drives first purpose, a purpose which, from the start, concerns a specific object; the instinctual pressure is necessarily felt as a fantasy that, whatever its content (for example, an infants desire to suck), once it can be verbalized68 presents itself in the form of a sentence containing three elements: subject (I), verb (swallow, bite, reject), object (breast, mother)69. Of course, because for the Kleinians drives are intrinsically a relation, Susan Isaacs shows how a fantasy like incorporation is also experienced as being incorporated, the active
This aspect of screen memories is, for Freud, proof that they are not true memories. Yet among conscious fantasies, they are the only ones which present themselves as reality. True scenes, they are the screens for scenes or for primal fantasies. 65 The Unconscious, op cit page 195 66 History of an Infantile Neurosis (Wolfman), op cit page 120 and 120n 67 [literal translation = wishfantasy] 68 For Susan Isaacs, primary phantasies are dealt with by mental processes far removed from words. It is only to be able to speak of them that we express them in words but by doing so we introduce a foreign element. Susan Isaacs, using one of Freuds formulations, speaks of the language of the drives; and it is certainly true that it is not the verbal or non-verbal character that defines the nature of language. But if Susan Isaacs confounds language and the power of expression, perhaps she misses what is most original in the conceptions of Melanie Klein: the attempt to grasp a language that is not made up of words but is nonetheless structured by paired opposites (goodbad, inside-outside). The technical audacity of Melanie Klein presupposes a reference not to the mobile expression of instinctual life, but to a few fundamental signifiers. 69 Cf. the diverse variations formulated by Isaacs: I want to eat her all up, I want to keep her inside me, I want to tear her to bits, I want to throw her out of me, I want to bring her back, I must have her now, etc.
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becoming passive. Even better, she shows that the fear of a return to the sender is constitutive of fantasy itself. But is it sufficient to recognize in the fantasy of incorporation the equivalence of eating and being eaten? If there is still the idea of the subject having a place, even in a passive role, are we at the deepest level of fantasy? If, for Susan Isaacs, fantasy constitutes an immediate expression of drive, almost consubstantial with it, and if, in the last instance, fantasy can be reduced to the relation that links a subject and an object by a verb indicating an action (with the form of an omnipotent wish), it is because, for her, the structure of the drive is inseparable from that which it intends: the instinct intuits, knows, the object which will satisfy it. The fantasy, which first expresses libidinal and aggressive drives, quickly mutates itself into a defensive form, and in the end all the subjects internal dynamics are deployed along the lines of this unique organization. Such a conception postulates, in accord with certain Freudian formulations, that all that is conscious has had a preliminary unconscious stage and that the ego is a differentiated part of the id. This necessarily leads us to see a fantasy in every mental operation, a fantasy which can in principle be reduced to an instinctual operation. The biological subject is in direct continuity with the subject of the fantasy the sexual, human subject according to the sequence: soma id fantasy (of desire, of defense) ego mechanism.

In this account, the action of repression must be badly comprehended since in it fantasy life is more implicit than repressed and contains its own specific conflicts because of the coexistence at the heart of fantasies of contradictory aims. This line of theorizing results in a profusion of fantasy in which one can not recognize the particular structure that Freud tried to unpack, and in which one loses the relationship, difficult to specify but insisted upon, which he establishes between fantasy and sexuality. It is astonishing that, when he had already clearly recognized the existence and extent of childhood sexual life and childhood fantasies, Freud continued to connect the essential fantasizing activity to the period of pubertal and pre-pubertal masturbation70. As, for instance in 1920 in a note added to Three Essays71. Perhaps it is because for Freud there is a close correlation between fantasy and autoerotism; a correlation not fully explained by fantasy serving to disguise autoerotism. Freud seems to share the common notion that, in the absence of a real object, the subject searches for and creates an imaginary satisfaction. Freud endorsed this way of seeing things when creating a theoretical model for the formation of desire in its object and purpose72. The origin of fantasy would then lie in the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire, the infant, in the absence of the real object, reproducing as a hallucination the original experience of satisfaction. In this sense, the most fundamental

70

Of course, masturbation usually implies an imaginary relation with an object; so it only from an external point of view that it can be called auto-erotic. But an infantile auto-erotic activity, thumb sucking for example, in no way implies the absence of an object. What essentially defines it as auto-erotic is, as we explain below, a particular mode of satisfaction, specific to the birth of sexuality and of which something persists in pubertal masturbation. 71 Three Essays, op cit page 226 72 The first wishing seems to have been a hallucinatory cathecting of the memory of satisfaction Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. V, page 598

fantasies would be those that tend re-find the hallucinated objects linked to the earliest experience of the rise and resolution of desire73. But even before disentangling what the Freudian fiction (Fiktion) [i.e. the hallucination of the experience of satisfaction] is supposed to explain, it is necessary to question its meaning, especially since, though rarely formulated in detail, it is always a presupposition in Freuds conception of primary process. One could see it as a myth of origin: what Freud claims to have recaptured, in this figurative expression, is the very moment of the emergence of desire. This is an analytic construction, or fantasy, that tries to get at the moment of cleavage between before and after which still contains both: the mythical moment of disjunction between the appeasement of need (Befriedigung) and the fulfillment of desire (Wunscherfllung), between the two moments represented by the real experience and its hallucinatory revival, between the object that gratifies and the sign74 that simultaneously marks the object and its absence: mythical moment of the rejoining of hunger and sexuality at their point of origin Now, ourselves caught in a fantasy of origins, we claim to have found the origin of fantasy this time placing it in the course of the real history of the child, in the development of sexuality (the perspective of the second chapter of Three Essays) and reconnect it to the appearance of autoerotism in the creation of what Freud calls pleasure premium. This occurs at the moment when, in the world of needs, the vital functions whose goals and mechanisms are fixed and whose objects are pre-formed, detach themselves - separate themselves from the pleasure premium which is not pleasure in the completion of a function nor in the reduction of the tension born of the need, but a marginal product of the process. But, in speaking of the appearance of autoerotism, even though we avoid turning it into a stage of development of the libido, even though we underline its permanence and presence in all adult sexual behavior, we risk overlooking the meaning of the notion and what it can demonstrate of the function as well as the structure of fantasy. If the notion of autoerotism is often criticized, it is because it is misunderstood by referring it to the category of object relations as the first stage, enclosed within itself, from which the subject must rejoin the world of objects. It is easy to confront this account, using a tremendous amount of observational data, with the variety and complexity of the links that, from the beginning, unite the infant and his external object, most importantly his mother. When we turn to what Freud says of autoerotism, principally in Three Essays, he has no intention of
Cf. for instance Susan Isaacs interpretation of Freuds hypothesis of the first hallucination: It seems probable that hallucination works best at times of less intense instinctual tension, perhaps when the infant half awakes and first begins to be hungry, The pain of frustration then stirs up a still stronger desire, viz. the wish to take the whole breast into himself and keep it there as a source of satisfaction; and this in its turn will for a time omnipotently fulfill itself in belief, in hallucination. This hallucination of the internal satisfying breast may, however, break down altogether if frustration continues and hunger is not satisfied, instinct tension proving too strong to be denied. The Nature and Function of Phantasy in Rivere, J. (Ed) Developments in Psychoanalysis, page 86 It is easy to see the embarrassing difficulty Isaacs has trying to reconcile the idea of a hallucinatory satisfaction with the demands of a frustrated instinct. How can an infant feed itself on the wind? This Freudian model becomes incomprehensible unless one understands that the primal hallucination is not of the real object but of the lost object, not the milk but the breast which signifies it. 74 The breast , which psychoanalysts have named in error the object of desire.
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denying the existence of a primary relation with the object, on the contrary, he clearly indicates that the drive only becomes autoerotic after having lost its object75: At a time at which the first beginnings of sexual satisfaction are still linked with the taking of nourishment, the sexual drive has a sexual object outside the infants own body in the shape of his mothers breast. It is only later that the drive loses that object, just at the time, perhaps, when the child is able to form a total idea of the person to whom the organ that is giving him satisfaction belongs. As a rule the sexual drive then becomes auto-erotic76 A precious passage also because of the hint in contains (in the words italicized by us): in its formation the autoerotic fantasy contains not only the part object (breast, thumb taken as substitute) but the mother as a whole person who thus withdraws at the very moment of her totalization. This totalization should not be understood on the level of a perceptual Gestalt, but in terms of the infants demand which the mother grants or denies [i.e. the mother as a whole object capable of good or bad, satisfying or frustrating intentions/acts.] If one can say of autoerotism that it is objectless (objektlos), it is in no sense because it appears before all relations with an object77, nor because with the arrival of autoerotism objects are no longer sought out for satisfaction, but only because the natural mode of apprehending the object is split: the sexual drive separates from the non-sexual functions (alimentary, for example) on which it leans78 and from which it takes its aim and object. Thus the origin of autoerotism is the moment in which sexuality detaches itself from [the need for] any natural object and gives itself over to fantasy, and by that very process creates itself as sexuality. This moment is more abstract than located in time both because it is constantly renewed and because it is necessary to assume the existence of an erotic excitation before it can be sought for as such. But, looked at in the opposite way, couldnt it be said that it is the irruption of fantasy that provokes this disjunction between sexuality and need79. Circular causality or simultaneous birth? The fact is that, however far back one goes, fantasy and sexuality find their origin at the same point. Autoerotic satisfaction, to the extent that it exists in an autonomous state, is defined by a very precise trait: it is the product of the anarchic activity of partial drives which are strictly linked to the excitation of specified erogenous zones (an excitation that is born and satisfied in the same place), it is not the global pleasure of functioning, but rather a fragmented pleasure, an organ pleasure (Organlust) narrowly located.

75 76

[Laplanche and Pontalis put the remainder of this paragraph and the next paragraph in a footnote.] Three Essays, page 222 77 Some analysts name this an objectless stage in a genetic conception that one could call totalitarian because it confuses the formation of the libidinal object with that of objectivity in the external world and it claims to establish stages in the development of the ego as an organ of reality, additionally they hold that these stages are correlated with the stages of libidinal development. 78 Elsewhere we develop this notion, which is fundamental to the Freudian theory of the drives. (The Language of Psychoanalysis) [See footnote #2 above.] 79 In one of his first reflections on fantasy, Freud notes that the impulses can emanate from fantasies. (Draft N) S.E. I, page 255, Complete letters page 250

The capacity for being erogenous is inherent in certain predestined bodily zones (thus, in the activity of sucking, the oral zone is predestined by its very physiology to acquire erotic value) but this potential exists in any organ (even internal organs), in any region with any bodily function. In all cases, the function only serves as support. For example, the ingestion of food serves as a model for the fantasy of incorporation. Modeled on the function, sexuality is precisely what is different than the function; in this sense, its prototype is not nursing but the continued [non- nutritive] sucking, the moment when the external object is abandoned, when the aim and the source become autonomous from eating and the digestive system. One could almost say that the ideal form of autoerotism are those lips which kiss themselves80: in this enjoyment seeming closed in on itself, as at the deepest level of fantasy, in a discourse addressed to no one, the distinction between subject and object is abolished. Let us add that Freud constantly stressed that the role of the mother (or others) as seducer when she washes, dresses and caresses her child81; and, further, that the privileged erogenous zones (oral, anal, urogenital, skin) are at the same time the regions getting the most attention from the mother and which have a manifest signification of exchange (orifices or skin covering). Thus it is clear how certain, chosen locations of the body can serve, not only to support a local pleasure, but also as meeting place with desire, with maternal fantasy, and through that with a form of primal fantasy. In situating the origin of fantasy in the time of autoerotism, we have marked the connection of fantasy with desire. But fantasy is not the object of desire, it is the staging of desire [mise en scne82]. In fantasy, the subject does not pursue the object or its sign, but pictures himself involved in a sequence of images. He does not simply represent the desired object but rather he represents himself as participating in the scene although, in the forms of fantasy closest to primal fantasy, he cannot be assigned a specific place. (Thus the danger in clinical practice of interpretations which claim to do so.) The consequences are: while always present in the fantasy, the subject may be represented in a desubjectivized form, which is to say, in the very syntax of the sequence in question. Also, to the extent that desire is not a pure arousal of drive, but is articulated in the fantasys sentence, this fantasy sentence is the chosen site of the most primitive defensive mechanisms like turning against the self, reversal into the opposite, projection, denial; these defenses are indissolubly linked to the primary function of fantasy the staging of desire (mise en scne du dsire) inasmuch as desire itself is formed as a prohibition, inasmuch as the conflict is a conflict at origin.

80

Three Essays, page xxx. Cf. also Instincts and Their Vicissitudes in which Freud analyzes the paired opposites sadism-masochism and voyeurism-exhibitionism. Beneath the active or passive form of the phrase (e.g. to see to be seen), there must be a reflexive form (to see oneself) which, according to Freud, would be primordial. One must look for this primordial instance when the subject no longer situates himself in one of the terms of the fantasy. 81 A childs intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object. Three Essays, S.E. VII, page 223. Nevertheless, it is classically said that Freud took a long time to recognize the bond with the mother! 82 [Staging in the sense that a play is staged.]

As for knowing the director of this staging, we psychoanalysts must not rely on the resources of our science, nor even those of myth. We must become philosophers. Translated by Jonathan House Draft of February 2, 2003