Lecture at the 10th international conference in literature and psychoanalysis
Amsterdam, Maison Descartes, June 24, 1993
I want to share with you some reflections on the several meanings of the term unconscious fantasy. The main theme is scene and symbol. Some reflections beforehand. To introduce the issues in a sharp and also simplified way I present the diverse meanings in the form of pairs of contrastive terms, which I call A and B.
(1) (A) unconscious fantasy as a capacity, in the sense of an ability or a faculty over against (B) unconscious fantasy as the inner world of the person, the universe within thoughts and feelings.
Fantasy as the faculty of imagination (in German Einbildungskraft) is that which distinguishes us most clearly from all the other animals. In this sense fantasy is man's most precious gift and his most dangerous liability. To call attention to the significance of unconscious fantasy as an 'inner world' I have only to point to the work of the Kleinians.
(2) In my enumeration of meanings I must be brief, so I go on to the next pair of opposites: (A) unconscious fantasy as a primitive, chaotic buzzing confusion over against (B) unconscous fantasy as a highly sophisticated form of primary process functioning. As a direct derivative of the instinctual drives unconscious fantasy is a primitive urge seeking discharge, a wish which can only wish for satisfaction. In its sophisticated form unconscious fantasy has a refined and efficient contact with the outer world of a kind which the secondary process is lacking. In this context we have to mention the preverbal and non-verbal forms of man's symbolizing capacity.
(3) Our third pair: (A) We can conceive unconscious fantasy primarily from the point of view of impulse or instinctual drive, (B) or from the point of view of defense, although of course all behavior is almost always a compromise of impulse and defense. I start with defense: (B) If one assigns a significant role to the influence of the external reality on the life of a child, especially if trauma is an important concept of one's theory, then one is inclined to see unconscious fantasy as a defense. E.g. trauma's that cannot be directly remembered, because they were too overwhelming, find their way into unconscious fantasy as a defense against the memories. Fantasy takes the place of memory. We also note then that the child in his fantasies tries to master the trauma and to integrate into the fantasy elements of the memory. In this sense defense also means processing, handling and digesting the consequences of the impact of external reality. If, on the other hand, all theoretical attention is directed unto the instinctual drives and their wishfulfilling power, then unconscious fantasy is looked upon as a direct derivative of the drive. Unconscious fantasy is then an original event. Unconscious fantasy is the spontaneous expression of the drive-wish fantasying fulfillment, irrespective of the influence of the external world. Of course I am speaking of theoretical biases and not giving a fair rendering of complex theories.
(4) A fourth pair: (A) unconscious fantasy is very often conceived of as a quality of experience, as a process going on unconsciously in the mind. In this sense unconscious fantasy is a content, which presupposes something else which directs the content. Unconscious fantasy then is something which is being organized, it is not an agency or formative principle which organizes. (B) In contrast to this we find the conception that unconscious fantasy is an agency which regulates and controls experience, as a principle which organizes experience. In this sense unconscious fantasy is not a quality or process, but a structure, not a content but a form. To speak metaphorically: unconscious fantasy is not the river, but the bed of the river, not the loose soil, but the bedrock of the soil.
(5) I now come to the fifth pair and there is a small overlap between this pair and the sixth pair. (A) We can look upon unconscious fantasy from the point of view of the individual with his unique combination of traits, or (B) from the point of view of the universal. For the individual and the unique I use the word idiocratic. Some theoreticians prefer to limit themselves to the unique universe of phenomena which this individual patient offers them, and to use typical, general and universal applications only as an auxiliary to this work. Others strongly involve universal concepts in their considerations of the individual case. Well known are the Freudian and Kleinian concepts of primal fantasies (Urphantasien), e.g. the primal scene (Urszene), castration and seduction. They point to the universal structures that operate regardless of the concrete experience of the individual child. According to this outlook unconscious fantasies are universal structures that organize the fantasy life of the individual. They are more or less conceived of as a fylogenetically transmitted inheritance. This opens up, among other things, the question: how important are the highly individual, idiocratically created symbols over against universal symbols?
(6) In this bird's-eye view I come to the sixth pair of opposites. In discussions one may observe an alternating between (A) what I call the broad unconscious fantasy and (B) the narrow unconscious fantasy. The broad unconscious refers to Freud's large conception of the Id (das Es) as the normal or ordinary unconscious reservoir, from which consciousness derives its inspiration, energy, power and creativity. It entails the power of nature in man. By narrow unconscious I mean that specific, limited part of the Id, which has been rigorously split off from the ordinary unconscious and from consciousness. One of the essential functions of the transference is to change unproductive fantasies of the split off consciousness, a third process in the mind over against the primary and the secondary process and to change the split off world of fantasy into the inheritance of the broad unconscious, the Id. The rejected fantasies of the unconscious retain their character of presences. In a psychoanalysis they loose the character of presences. If one confuses the narrow and the broad unconscious one gets into a muddle. Much confusing thinking inside psychoanalysis is resulted from confusing the split off unconscious of the repressed with the general unconscious of the great Id. They differ radically in their nature.
(7) Our seventh pair: Throughout the history of psychoanalysis a tension has existed between two contrasting approaches to fantasy: (A) One interpretation takes up fantasy as a flight from reality. (B) According to another interpretation fantasy is the integrator of reality and the guardian of reality. Laplanche and Pontalis have beautifully phrased it (in The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1967): the unconscious fantasy as a purely illusory production which cannot be sustained when it is confronted with a correct apprehension of reality. So in this sense unconscious fantasy is brought into contact with neurosis, pathology, with the flight from reality and turning away, it is seen as an inferior process. The relation between fantasy and reality is of course a large issue about which I can say only very few words. The dual nature of unconscious fantasy is directly related to the ambiguity of the concept of psychic reality. Psychic reality stands over against external reality. Psychic reality is not reality, it must give account of its doing over against reality and is often revealed in its elusive and delusive nature. But the other half of the truth is that external reality is only an aspect of psychic reality. Psychic reality encompasses external reality, for all reality is psychic in this sense that there is no reality apart from someone's perception of it. After a century we know this better than Freud could know this, he had quite an other conception of reality, inspired by positivism. The only world we know is the world of psychic reality. In this sense there is no antithesis between the two. There is a tendency in psychoanalysis throughout to associate unconscious fantasy to neurosis and pathology, rightly
so because there is a dangerous tendency in fantasy, but the other side has more often been neglected. There is no reality without fantasy, never. Fantasy is curing from reality and fantasy integrates reality. One also gets to the problem of the limits of fantasy: when reality is too overwhelming fantasy fails in interiorizing reality and it comes to its limits. This is a large issue in psychoanalysis, the question of the limits of analysibility, because fantasy was not able to interiorize reality and reality has remained a strange reality itself within the psychic. One can also consider that there is an unconscious that can become conscious, and that applies to very much of the unconscious, but there is also an unconscious which can never become conscious. A difficult problem. One can say in the image of Freud's comparison with the Zuyderzee: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden". The wild ocean becoming land is an image of the unconscious fantasy becoming conscious, in another sense the ocean is never drained and never becomes land and one can only get better ships to sail the ocean.
I now come to the main theme, scene and symbol in unconscious fantasy and I start with the following question: how do we discover during a psychoanalysis the existence and the operation of unconscious fantasy? A rather simple answer to this question is: by taking as our point of departure the specific content which is in our consciousness at this moment. This may be a conscious fantasy, but it may also be something else, e.g. a perception, a thought, a feeling, a memory or a bodily awareness. This state of affairs confronts us immediately with the link, and also the tension, between the unconscious and the conscious. What we are looking for is the unconscious fantasy. But one cannot get the unconscious fantasy as an isolated, pure form. We can only get it mixed with something conscious. One cannot approach the unconscious fantasy straight forwardly, only indirectly. We have to examine the conscious fantasy, perception etc. very intently in order to detect in it the operation of unconscious fantasy.
Unconscious fantasy expresses itself in symbols. This expression can take place in two ways: in the way of the secondary process and in the way of the primary process. Pure forms of the secondary process are found in science and technology. In this case the symbols are so refined and so exact that one symbol stands for one thing only, the ideal of positivism and mathematics. One symbol stands for one thing and for nothing else. On the other hand we find perhaps the purest form of the primary process in dreams: one symbol stands for several things at the same time. In the dream everything is possible in contradistinction to the rigorous rules of e.g. science.
In psychoanalysis we are principally concerned with symbols that arise in the manner of the primary process, i.e. a number of intensive feelings and their meanings may be comprised in one symbol. I want to illustrate this with a few examples, which I derive among others from Paul Meehl and Theodor Reik.
My first example: A woman, coming home late at night, sees for a fraction of a second, a large black bird (she thinks a raven), perched on her pillow next to her husband's head. He is sleeping. The conscious, but for a much larger part unconscious fantasy, was to revenge herself on her husband for his neglect of her. The unconscious fantasy expressed itself not in complicated verbal arguments, as happens in the secondary process, but in one image. Associated with Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem The Raven this one image stood for the unconscious fantasy: "when I'll be dead or gone, you'll mourn over the loss".
My next example concerns a student in a speech seminar. All of a sudden she develops an intense fear to speak before her teacher and classmates. She knows the exact moment when the inhibition started. It was during an experiment, which was part of the seminar. Each student had to speak before a microphone in an empty classroom. Before this experiment she had been a well poised speaker in public. These two new variables, the microphone and the invisible audience, suddenly became symbols of the accusing voice of her mother, and behind the mother there loomed large the God of mother, who condemned her for her hate and her negligence and loveless attitude towards her mother. Speaking into the microphone also symbolized openly uttering all those evil thoughts over against the invisibly present God. By way of the primary process microphone and empty room were the magically loaded symbols of a world of unconscious fantasy.
In my third example I want to elucidate how free association allows an unusual conscious fantasy to come up, and how an unconscious fantasy grasps the opportunity to slip into consciousness, hidden on the back of the conscious fantasy. During an analytic hour the analysand complains that nothing will come into his mind, whereupon the analyst asks the patient to think of something that is farthest removed from his thought, something he would never think of. By the way, this was Freud's suggestion to Theodor Reik. The patient is silent for a moment and then says: the swamps of Wutipe. It was in these far removed swamps in China that the patient's father had contracted the disease that led to his death. Months before the patient had mentioned these swamps and later forgot about it. When the analyst reminded him of it, the patient burst into tears. Now, the moment the patient mentioned the name Wutipe, he had no idea that behind this thought there lay the highly charged world of his unconscious fantasies about his father's death. Unconscious fantasy had made use of the seemingly innocuous conscious fantasy into which he was lured by his analyst.[1]
I now want to give you an example of how unconscious fantasy may operate in the analyst, again an example from Theodor Reik. The analysis of a young woman has come into a phase of stagnation. The patient cannot get over her grief for a lost relationship with a man she still loves. But the analyst has the feeling that there is more to it. Then there comes a session in which the patient mentions a toothache and tells that her dentist extracted a wisdom tooth yesterday. The cavity still aches. After a silence she points to a bookshelf and says: "There stands a book upside down." A moment it was dark in the mind of the analyst and then it flashed through his mind: She has had an abortion, performed by her lover who was a gynaecologist. The analyst, Theodor Reik, indicates that he arrived at this thought not by logical reasoning, but by way of unconscious fantasy.
Inspired by the hunch 'there is something she does not tell me', the analyst in his own unconscious fantasy understood the cavity of the extracted tooth and the book upside down as symbols of the patient's unconscious fantasies around the pregnancy and the abortion that had taken place. In this case the fantasy of the analyst proved to be correct.
One more brief illustration in closing this series of examples. On entering the home of his analyst a young man notices a house painter working in the hall. His first association is that the painter has moved listening at the door of the consulting room. The analyst immediately has the notion that there is a homosexual fantasy behind this thought. The next associations of the analysand confirm this notion.
In giving these five clinical illustrations I have tried to give some more body to the abstract formula primary process symbolization. I now want to apply this formula primary process symbolization to the psychoanalytic situation itself. Here also there is a movement from conscious to unconscious fantasy. One of the conscious meanings of the psychoanalytic situation is that of a contract in which each of the partners takes his own responsibility. An important unconscious meaning of the psychoanalytic situation consists in the relationship between the analyst as a mother who nourishes and gives security and the analysand as a child who entrusts himself to this care. This again is a case of primary process symbolization. Unconscious fantasy works with very primitive concepts of space and time. Nearness, clinging, and security stand over against distance and separation. The primitive concepts circle around presence versus absence. More specifically nearness means secure warmth or it means the threat of a devouring fusion; separation means presence at a safe distance or it means abandonment and the threat of being destructed.
This situation is so complex because the child (and later the adult) has an enduring need both of union and of separation — Ernest Becker spoke in this connection of the twin ontological motives — , both of nearness and distance. The whole course of a psychoanalysis is accompanied by this unconscious fantasy regarding the psychoanalytic situation itself. Often this fantasy needs not to be expressed, because it works as a silent factor. There are situations however, in which this fantasy must definitely be expressed. I want to give you one example.
George has entered a phase of his analysis in which he finds the silence of his analyst very irritating. For him the analyst must remain vocally in the air. During a pause of silence he shouts: "Hey man, do something for the money I pay you." He then tells that one of his friends has an analyst who constantly offers him penetrating interpretations. After a while it turns out that behind this conscious fantasy there is a quite different unconscious fantasy, namely that the silent analyst is the depressive mother of his early childhood. Unconsciously he fears that the analyst's silence can kill him or that he with his own aggressive silence has killed the analyst. The psychoanalytic situation itself is now loaded with unconscious fantasy. After the analyst has interpreted these interconnections, gradually there is a resurgence of scenes, in which the mother kept silent, when he was naughty, whereby only her eyes spoke: 'why do you cause mother to suffer so much?' Early scenes are also revived in images, e.g. my feeling is locked up in a safe after mother's eye has shut the door. This case illustrates how the psychoanalytic situation and the transference have themselves become a scene, in which scenes of childhood are revived.
With these considerations a second concept has come to the foreground: the concept of scene. In the foregoing we considered the primary process symbolization of unconscious fantasy. Fantasy expresses itself in symbols. Now it is time to consider how unconscious fantasy expresses itself in scenes. Unconscious fantasy is not only symbolized, it is also re-enacted. It may become clearer how the concepts fit together. Free association in the analytic situation entices unconscious fantasy to emerge. Analysis in general means letting a whole fall again into parts. Psycho-analysis means letting the synthesis of habits, defenses, stereotype patterns fall apart, so that the underlying unconscious fantasies are laid bare. In this process one phenomenon plays a major part: transference. When the habits and defenses are soaked loose, the fundamental scenes of the analysand's life are being re-enacted in the transference. We can term transference the re-enactment of unconscious fantasy. I shall try to clarify this constellation of concepts. But first I want to pay some closer attention to the concept of scene, which is rather hard to grasp.
I start from the original meaning of the word 'scene'. In first instance scene is the place where an act occurs; secondly scene is the act, the occurrence which takes place. The power of scene is its location, that is to say: on this site and nowhere else this one, unique event really takes place. The term scene refers to that which happens once only, to the non-returnable, it refers the individual thing, to the unique, to the historical, i.e. that which happens once in reality, it refers to the episodical, i.e. that which is clearly bounded in time and space: on this spot and in this moment this event happens.
From this it may be clear that there is a polar bound between scene and symbol. They are polar coordinates. We are concerned with the tension between the two. I had, in preparing this talk, often to think of the Christian symbol of the Crucifixion. The scene is Calvary, one only, and the symbol is the endless repeating of the scene in the mass. So scene and symbol are beautifully together. And as you know there is a whole discussion about the question: is the mass only a symbol, an imagination or it is real as Luther said? Modernity and the Middle Ages here split apart.
Symbol is not restricted to one historical event, it encompasses many things that have happened in many places and also that which will happen in the future. It transcends the site of happening. The symbol points to something elsewhere, to a reality yonder. As I will try to illustrate, symbol is the precipitation, the upshot of scene. In this sense symbol is the consequence of scene. Symbol however is also the presupposition of the condition antecedent to scene. In antithesis to the once-only, the non-returnable character of scene, symbol is repeatable; contrary to the transcendence of scene, symbol is enduring.
(1) I now want to illustrate the intricate polarity of scene and symbol in a few clinical vignettes. The first one of the reasons why Oliver came into analysis was that he repeatedly created peculiar dramatic scenes in the streets of a provincial town where his girlfriend lived. He himself did not understand why he acted so strange. More than once a provoking stimulus occurred when his girlfriend paid attention to another man. Such a drama went e.g. in the following way. His girlfriend does not appear on time in the bar they had agreed upon, but phones a bit later from another bar in town, whether he will come to her over there. There she sits with a stranger, a huge man. In such situations Oliver collapses like a jelly. When you think of the Oedipus complex, this case is a little more complicated. After a stiff and awkward conversation Oliver walks off and sits down dolefully, with his head in his hands on a windowsill of a shop in a busy street. People gather around him wanting to help him, but he remains motionless. Meanwhile like a stage director he keeps control of the whole situation up to the moment when the local police takes the matter in hand. Then Oliver suddenly explodes in a fury of accusations against the police. In Oliver's diverse drama's one element is always present. He demonstrates: "I do not partake in this false world, leave me out". You also feel the tremendous appeal of his behavior.
What is the unconscious fantasy behind the conscious fantasy of these drama's? During the analysis the central unconscious fantasy turned out to be connected with a for him catastrophic discovery in his early childhood years, namely that he was not the eldest son (as he had thought before), but that a year before his birth the real eldest son, by the same name Oliver, had lived and had died a few weeks old. The process of remembering during analysis was very painful. At first he is convinced that he had heard it not from his mother but from an aunt when he was twelve or thirteen years old. But then after a while the images of the fundamental scene came back: the room and the hour in which his mother told it to him when he was seven years old. He now remembers how he had asked two or three times whether it was really true and whether that boy had exactly the same name as his.
The case of Oliver illustrates both a decidedly traumatic scene which has taken place in childhood and a deeply buried unconscious fantasy, which determines the whole life of the person and which can never be really unshrouded. The experience is of an overwhelming and total character, so that it can only incompletely be taken up into consciousness. The fantasy circles around an elusive stranger who intimately encompasses his life. In his fantasy he is endlessly engaged in putting together broken pieces like "I am not who I am. I am the other one, but the other one is original, I am not." In the provincial drama's he had to act out the idea 'I do not exist'.
(2) In my second vignette I want to show how a more deeply repressed unconscious fantasy emerges behind less repressed unconscious fantasies. During Helen's analysis a memory comes back of an event, when she was nine years old. In the large family to which she belonged it was the custom that on Saturday afternoon all the children were washed in the bathtub. After being washed each child had its assigned task in cleaning the house and the garden. During Helen's getting undressed her mother finds in Helen's panties a note written to her by a boy in her class. In the note a droll allusion is made to the penis of the teacher. The sternly calvinistic mother is shocked. Without any further question she commands: "Go away, dirty girl, you need not help your mother this morning."
During the early years of analysis Helen experienced as the crucial scene the moment she stood in the doorway leaving the home, dazed by an incomprehensible freedom and doom. Much later in the analysis there came flashes of another scene, the one connected with the real crucial unconscious fantasy. She re-experiences the moment at the end of that Saturday afternoon, when she is standing in the little alleyway next to the house and has the hardly conscious conviction: "I cannot and will not return home." In the analysis she is now in the scene. She sees the house, the alleyway, the trees of the garden and re-experiences her inexpressible feeling. In the analytic hours she becomes conscious of the fact that a large part of her inner world had been brought to a stop that afternoon, and is only now coming to life again. In a certain sense she had not returned home. Only now she returns hone, she can enter the house and leave it.
(3) In the next vignette I want to illustrate how a scene which appears in a dream turns out to be the creative expression of a central concern of a person's life. It concerns a man whom I call Stephen. Being occupied by a vague sense of loneliness and sadness Stephen is unexpectedly struck by the following memory. He is seven years old and is sitting on the swing in the garden of his home. He enjoys the fact that his sister (three and a half years younger) is not there to push him off the swing because she wants to sit on it. But in his joy he is at the same time mixed up. In this period around his seventh year his little sister has gone to a sanatorium for epileptic children for a period of almost a year. The house is filled with an atmosphere of mourning.
By re-experiencing this childhood scene of sitting and swinging to and fro, the heretofore uncertain and obscure sense of loneliness becomes an acute pain. It is the sensuous character of the scene that overwhelms him and when he describes it he begins to cry, which is unusual for him. He relives the childhood scene: the light through the trees, the fragrance of the shrubs and the flowers, the noises from the kitchen, the swinging to and fro and through all this his mood of struggling with an insoluble riddle. He is relieved to have the place all to himself, but even now his little sister pushes him away. She fills the whole house with her very present absence. So, evidently you can never get what you want. In this scene, in which to outward appearance nothing happens, his childhood world of abandonment and overcharge is compressed. By reliving this childhood scene of being suspended on his swing and in a certain sense by living it for the first time a whole atmosphere of childhood years comes back in a way it had not done before.
I suggest that we now examine a bit more closely some characteristics of the scenes I have described. In these scenes the child is struggling with a problem that he cannot solve. As a consequence the child cannot leave the scene behind, but remains stuck in the scene and on that certain point the child has never gone any further. Regression does not return to fixation. In other words the scenes are concerned with an incomplete and unfinished reality. E.g. the room and the hour in which Oliver heard his mother reveal to him the existence of his dead brother, the alleyway in which Helen stood arrested, and the garden in which Stephen was swinging to and fro — these scenes represent a reality which remains incomplete.
Unfinished scenes keep pushing until they are finished. This phenomenon is often labeled the Zeigarnik effect, after the famous investigations of Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927, in which she demonstrated that interrupted tasks endure more in a person's memory than completed tasks. When something is finished, one can forget about it. If it is unfinished, it keeps hounding memory until it is finished. By the way, Frederick Perls got his famous concept of 'unfinished business' from Bluma Zeigarnik. The drama's which Oliver staged in the provincial town are a striking example of a hounding unfinished reality.
Unconscious fantasy, in the sense in which it is unfinished fantasy, is always looking for situations in which it can express itself. Goethe already said: "Das Unerfüllte bleibt ewig im Menschen." Unconscious fantasy carries within itself a transference readiness, an inclination towards transference. In this context one of the factors determining the central place of transference in psychoanalysis becomes clear. Unconscious fantasy is searching endlessly for persons and situations unto which it can transfer its unfinished business. But the remarkable thing is that in all this searching unconscious fantasy remains too deeply repressed to show itself directly. It manifests itself only in its derivatives. This is the tragedy of neurosis. Now, in the transference, in the psychoanalytic situation, there comes the golden chance for unconscious fantasy to enter the scene directly, and there to play its full role. Therefore in the transference unconscious fantasy can change in a way it cannot in other situations.
In this consists the specific efficacy of the psychoanalytic situation. We can clarify this a bit further by taking the dimension of time into consideration. My clinical examples made clear that the unconscious fantasy of the analysand got stuck not only in an uncompleted time, but also in a time that has been brought to a stop, in a motionless and stagnant time. A further characteristic of this form of time is that it has been split off from ordinary time so thoroughgoingly and radically, even so outrageously, that it has become a time that does not partake in ordinary life with its growth and change.
One more significant characteristic has to be mentioned. It is by ordinary means an inaccessible time, impenetrable and unyielding. Because of this, throughout the years of his life, the unconscious fantasy of the patient has been unable to change really. Transference in the psychoanalytic situation offers unconscious fantasy the particular and extraordinary opportunity to issue forth from the split off and motionless time, and to make its appearance on the stage of the psychoanalytic situation. The old time of split off fantasy takes place together with the present time of transference. Analysand and analyst are contemporaries in a deep sense. They share the exceedingly transitory, the volatile concrete time of that which happens between the two. To be able to talk about what happens between them, the very moment that it happens — that's the secret.
Transference means that the unconscious fantasy gets a second chance after the failure of the ill-fated opportunities of childhood. To uncover unconscious fantasy an opening is offered once more — and in a certain sense is offered for the first time to disclose itself and to be changed.
We noted first that unconscious fantasy expresses itself in symbols. After that we saw how unconscious fantasy expresses itself in scenes. We observed further how unconscious fantasy appears in the transference. What remains to be done is to indicate, however sketchy that may be, the interconnections between scene and symbol.
I hope that the clinical examples which I gave you have succeeded in conveying to you a feeling of the impact which a scene may have on the life of a patient. I remind you of the characteristics of scene: scene refers to that which really happens as an event in history. This implies a concrete location, the unique and individual character of the event, the once-only, i.e. the unrepeatable nature of the event. Scene is further characterized by its immediateness and its pre-reflective nature. The person is immersed in the scene, he experiences the scene as a totality, which cannot be divided up into parts. As soon as one divides it into parts one has already left the scene behind, one has moved on to an abstraction of the scene. In a scene one experiences reality as a ceaselessly flowing and fluctuating situational whole.
It will not surprise us that in a scene sensory experience plays such a large role. In sensory experience reality has a more granular and coarse structure than it has in e.g. abstract thought. During a scene reality impresses us with its substantial and massive character. In a scene we can figuratively, and sometimes literally, touch reality. When we bump into reality. we experience its force in resisting us.
I now remind you of what I said about the contrast between scene and symbol. Symbol abstracts from the reality of the scene, it transcends the concrete place of happening. Symbol comprises the sediment of this event and of many similar events. As we also saw: in contrast to the transience of scene, symbol is permanent. From the perspective of their complementary character it becomes clearer why scene and symbol are always together. The experience of the scene can be managed only if symbols order, categorize, schematize, and this inevitably also means distort the experience. From the scene, which is experienced as a totality, the symbols extricate themselves.
The power of scene is that something happens in reality. The power of symbol is that the event taking place is organized and is made tractable, so that the experience can be used in later action. While theoretically we may contrast scene and symbol as concepts opposed to each other, in practice they are inseparable, and enter into complex negotiations. Symbols play a part already in the way scenes are experienced. It is inevitable that the intangibles of the elusive totality of experience are instantaneously organized and schematized by symbols.
In the beginning I mentioned the case of the student who suddenly developed an inhibition the moment she had to speak before a microphone in an empty lecture room. This so-called simple case shows already the complexities of scene and symbol. It was the power of the scene that hit her: the unusual situation of a microphone in an empty classroom. After the evocative potency of the scene she had a fear which she did not have before. But microphone and empty room had such tremendous effects, because they instantaneously became symbols of her being condemned by an invisible God in alliance with her martyr mother. She perceived the scene in the manner of the symbols.
This togetherness of scene and symbol we can appropriately designate as being dialectic, in this sense that movement proceeds by way of opposite steps. On the one hand we have to distinguish the one step (scene) clearly from the opposite step (symbol). On the other hand the one step has no meaning apart from the opposite step. Scene and symbol are together in their separateness and they are divided in their togetherness. When one mixes them up one gets into a muddle, when one tears them apart one ends up nowhere. Already the case of the student before the microphone impressed upon us that scene is inconceivable without symbol. But over against this I want to draw your attention to the clinical examples in order to show you how very different symbol is from scene.
In the scene the mother says to Oliver: "There has been an older brother of yours, who bore the same name as you bear." In the symbol she says to him: "You have no existence of your own, you are not who you are, you are another and another is you." In the scene the mother says to Helen: "You have done something very dirty. Go away. This morning you need not help your mother." According to the symbol the mother says: "You are altogether worthless and bad, I reject you forever." In the scene this moment the mother looks very sadly at George. In the symbol she robs him of his feelings and locks them up for good. That afternoon in the garden when he was seven years old, Stephen experienced the scene of his swinging to and fro fortunately undisturbed by his little sister, but at the same time he was confused by the atmosphere of sadness in the house. But the symbol told him: "You will never get what you want, you remain forever abandoned and overcharged." It is clear that the scenes in the clinical examples I gave you produced such prodigious effects, because, among other things, in the scenes powerful symbols were at work.
This gives rise to one more rather large question, which has been implicit in my foregoing story. We may try to put it this way. In the life of a child countless scenes take place. What accounts for the fact that only a few scenes play such a crucial role in a psychoanalysis? What distinguishes these scenes from the innumerable other ones? The distinction cannot lie in the presence of scene and symbol per se. For in everything that happens to us or in us the dialectic of scene and symbol is operative. Also in small, inconsequential events we can discern the combination of scene and symbol.
So, there must be a third factor which accounts for the difference between the countless scenes of childhood and the few crucial scenes in a psychoanalysis. Once more the clinical examples shed light on this issue. In each of the illustrations we saw that the dialectic of scene and symbol was concerned with experiences of a very unusual kind, namely experiences in which the child confers a foundational meaning on his world and on himself. In these instances both scene and symbol are nodal points in which the strands of meaning whereby the child lives come together. We may summarize the nature of this third factor in the word core-experience. Here the word experience does not refer to one event but to a condensation of a number of important events.
In varying ways the clinical examples point to this state of affairs. E.g. the scene in which Oliver is told about his older brother is very different in nature from the scene in which Stephen is swinging in the garden. But they have in common that they are connected with a core-experience, by which the child gives order to his confusing world and to his own place in this world. The same applies to the student in the speech class, to George and to Helen.
The upshot of our story is that we have found three factors constituting unconscious fantasy: scene, symbol, and core-experience. I am aware that my descriptions — and this applies especially to core-experience — are very sketchy, incomplete and unsatisfactory. To illustrate this I have only to point to the time dimension of the core-experience. Core-experience is developed in the course of many years. By the succession of significant scenes and by symbols that become ever more condensed and compact the meanings whereby the child lives (this is another word for unconscious fantasy) — these meanings are endlessly worked over, organized, placed into patterns and simplified to schemata. Because of this time dimension the complexity of unconscious fantasy increases immensely. For around the scenes and the symbols of the core-experience a further organization takes place of a conglomeration of memories, feelings, fantasies and self-images.
In summary: scene, symbol, core-experience, these three constituting a time-directed organization of total experience, this makes for the complexity of unconscious fantasy. Seen in this way unconscious fantasy becomes one of the most encompassing ideas of psychoanalysis. Unconscious fantasy may be termed 'the ongoing story' of your life and mine. And with the emphasis on 'ongoing', that is to say on the infinity of new experience, I want to finish this story.
[1] Theodor Reik: Listening With The Third Ear. The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (1948). New York: Pyramid Books 1964, p. 259.
Amsterdam, Maison Descartes, June 24, 1993
I want to share with you some reflections on the several meanings of the term unconscious fantasy. The main theme is scene and symbol. Some reflections beforehand. To introduce the issues in a sharp and also simplified way I present the diverse meanings in the form of pairs of contrastive terms, which I call A and B.
(1) (A) unconscious fantasy as a capacity, in the sense of an ability or a faculty over against (B) unconscious fantasy as the inner world of the person, the universe within thoughts and feelings.
Fantasy as the faculty of imagination (in German Einbildungskraft) is that which distinguishes us most clearly from all the other animals. In this sense fantasy is man's most precious gift and his most dangerous liability. To call attention to the significance of unconscious fantasy as an 'inner world' I have only to point to the work of the Kleinians.
(2) In my enumeration of meanings I must be brief, so I go on to the next pair of opposites: (A) unconscious fantasy as a primitive, chaotic buzzing confusion over against (B) unconscous fantasy as a highly sophisticated form of primary process functioning. As a direct derivative of the instinctual drives unconscious fantasy is a primitive urge seeking discharge, a wish which can only wish for satisfaction. In its sophisticated form unconscious fantasy has a refined and efficient contact with the outer world of a kind which the secondary process is lacking. In this context we have to mention the preverbal and non-verbal forms of man's symbolizing capacity.
(3) Our third pair: (A) We can conceive unconscious fantasy primarily from the point of view of impulse or instinctual drive, (B) or from the point of view of defense, although of course all behavior is almost always a compromise of impulse and defense. I start with defense: (B) If one assigns a significant role to the influence of the external reality on the life of a child, especially if trauma is an important concept of one's theory, then one is inclined to see unconscious fantasy as a defense. E.g. trauma's that cannot be directly remembered, because they were too overwhelming, find their way into unconscious fantasy as a defense against the memories. Fantasy takes the place of memory. We also note then that the child in his fantasies tries to master the trauma and to integrate into the fantasy elements of the memory. In this sense defense also means processing, handling and digesting the consequences of the impact of external reality. If, on the other hand, all theoretical attention is directed unto the instinctual drives and their wishfulfilling power, then unconscious fantasy is looked upon as a direct derivative of the drive. Unconscious fantasy is then an original event. Unconscious fantasy is the spontaneous expression of the drive-wish fantasying fulfillment, irrespective of the influence of the external world. Of course I am speaking of theoretical biases and not giving a fair rendering of complex theories.
(4) A fourth pair: (A) unconscious fantasy is very often conceived of as a quality of experience, as a process going on unconsciously in the mind. In this sense unconscious fantasy is a content, which presupposes something else which directs the content. Unconscious fantasy then is something which is being organized, it is not an agency or formative principle which organizes. (B) In contrast to this we find the conception that unconscious fantasy is an agency which regulates and controls experience, as a principle which organizes experience. In this sense unconscious fantasy is not a quality or process, but a structure, not a content but a form. To speak metaphorically: unconscious fantasy is not the river, but the bed of the river, not the loose soil, but the bedrock of the soil.
(5) I now come to the fifth pair and there is a small overlap between this pair and the sixth pair. (A) We can look upon unconscious fantasy from the point of view of the individual with his unique combination of traits, or (B) from the point of view of the universal. For the individual and the unique I use the word idiocratic. Some theoreticians prefer to limit themselves to the unique universe of phenomena which this individual patient offers them, and to use typical, general and universal applications only as an auxiliary to this work. Others strongly involve universal concepts in their considerations of the individual case. Well known are the Freudian and Kleinian concepts of primal fantasies (Urphantasien), e.g. the primal scene (Urszene), castration and seduction. They point to the universal structures that operate regardless of the concrete experience of the individual child. According to this outlook unconscious fantasies are universal structures that organize the fantasy life of the individual. They are more or less conceived of as a fylogenetically transmitted inheritance. This opens up, among other things, the question: how important are the highly individual, idiocratically created symbols over against universal symbols?
(6) In this bird's-eye view I come to the sixth pair of opposites. In discussions one may observe an alternating between (A) what I call the broad unconscious fantasy and (B) the narrow unconscious fantasy. The broad unconscious refers to Freud's large conception of the Id (das Es) as the normal or ordinary unconscious reservoir, from which consciousness derives its inspiration, energy, power and creativity. It entails the power of nature in man. By narrow unconscious I mean that specific, limited part of the Id, which has been rigorously split off from the ordinary unconscious and from consciousness. One of the essential functions of the transference is to change unproductive fantasies of the split off consciousness, a third process in the mind over against the primary and the secondary process and to change the split off world of fantasy into the inheritance of the broad unconscious, the Id. The rejected fantasies of the unconscious retain their character of presences. In a psychoanalysis they loose the character of presences. If one confuses the narrow and the broad unconscious one gets into a muddle. Much confusing thinking inside psychoanalysis is resulted from confusing the split off unconscious of the repressed with the general unconscious of the great Id. They differ radically in their nature.
(7) Our seventh pair: Throughout the history of psychoanalysis a tension has existed between two contrasting approaches to fantasy: (A) One interpretation takes up fantasy as a flight from reality. (B) According to another interpretation fantasy is the integrator of reality and the guardian of reality. Laplanche and Pontalis have beautifully phrased it (in The Language of Psychoanalysis, 1967): the unconscious fantasy as a purely illusory production which cannot be sustained when it is confronted with a correct apprehension of reality. So in this sense unconscious fantasy is brought into contact with neurosis, pathology, with the flight from reality and turning away, it is seen as an inferior process. The relation between fantasy and reality is of course a large issue about which I can say only very few words. The dual nature of unconscious fantasy is directly related to the ambiguity of the concept of psychic reality. Psychic reality stands over against external reality. Psychic reality is not reality, it must give account of its doing over against reality and is often revealed in its elusive and delusive nature. But the other half of the truth is that external reality is only an aspect of psychic reality. Psychic reality encompasses external reality, for all reality is psychic in this sense that there is no reality apart from someone's perception of it. After a century we know this better than Freud could know this, he had quite an other conception of reality, inspired by positivism. The only world we know is the world of psychic reality. In this sense there is no antithesis between the two. There is a tendency in psychoanalysis throughout to associate unconscious fantasy to neurosis and pathology, rightly
so because there is a dangerous tendency in fantasy, but the other side has more often been neglected. There is no reality without fantasy, never. Fantasy is curing from reality and fantasy integrates reality. One also gets to the problem of the limits of fantasy: when reality is too overwhelming fantasy fails in interiorizing reality and it comes to its limits. This is a large issue in psychoanalysis, the question of the limits of analysibility, because fantasy was not able to interiorize reality and reality has remained a strange reality itself within the psychic. One can also consider that there is an unconscious that can become conscious, and that applies to very much of the unconscious, but there is also an unconscious which can never become conscious. A difficult problem. One can say in the image of Freud's comparison with the Zuyderzee: "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden". The wild ocean becoming land is an image of the unconscious fantasy becoming conscious, in another sense the ocean is never drained and never becomes land and one can only get better ships to sail the ocean.
I now come to the main theme, scene and symbol in unconscious fantasy and I start with the following question: how do we discover during a psychoanalysis the existence and the operation of unconscious fantasy? A rather simple answer to this question is: by taking as our point of departure the specific content which is in our consciousness at this moment. This may be a conscious fantasy, but it may also be something else, e.g. a perception, a thought, a feeling, a memory or a bodily awareness. This state of affairs confronts us immediately with the link, and also the tension, between the unconscious and the conscious. What we are looking for is the unconscious fantasy. But one cannot get the unconscious fantasy as an isolated, pure form. We can only get it mixed with something conscious. One cannot approach the unconscious fantasy straight forwardly, only indirectly. We have to examine the conscious fantasy, perception etc. very intently in order to detect in it the operation of unconscious fantasy.
Unconscious fantasy expresses itself in symbols. This expression can take place in two ways: in the way of the secondary process and in the way of the primary process. Pure forms of the secondary process are found in science and technology. In this case the symbols are so refined and so exact that one symbol stands for one thing only, the ideal of positivism and mathematics. One symbol stands for one thing and for nothing else. On the other hand we find perhaps the purest form of the primary process in dreams: one symbol stands for several things at the same time. In the dream everything is possible in contradistinction to the rigorous rules of e.g. science.
In psychoanalysis we are principally concerned with symbols that arise in the manner of the primary process, i.e. a number of intensive feelings and their meanings may be comprised in one symbol. I want to illustrate this with a few examples, which I derive among others from Paul Meehl and Theodor Reik.
My first example: A woman, coming home late at night, sees for a fraction of a second, a large black bird (she thinks a raven), perched on her pillow next to her husband's head. He is sleeping. The conscious, but for a much larger part unconscious fantasy, was to revenge herself on her husband for his neglect of her. The unconscious fantasy expressed itself not in complicated verbal arguments, as happens in the secondary process, but in one image. Associated with Edgar Allan Poe's famous poem The Raven this one image stood for the unconscious fantasy: "when I'll be dead or gone, you'll mourn over the loss".
My next example concerns a student in a speech seminar. All of a sudden she develops an intense fear to speak before her teacher and classmates. She knows the exact moment when the inhibition started. It was during an experiment, which was part of the seminar. Each student had to speak before a microphone in an empty classroom. Before this experiment she had been a well poised speaker in public. These two new variables, the microphone and the invisible audience, suddenly became symbols of the accusing voice of her mother, and behind the mother there loomed large the God of mother, who condemned her for her hate and her negligence and loveless attitude towards her mother. Speaking into the microphone also symbolized openly uttering all those evil thoughts over against the invisibly present God. By way of the primary process microphone and empty room were the magically loaded symbols of a world of unconscious fantasy.
In my third example I want to elucidate how free association allows an unusual conscious fantasy to come up, and how an unconscious fantasy grasps the opportunity to slip into consciousness, hidden on the back of the conscious fantasy. During an analytic hour the analysand complains that nothing will come into his mind, whereupon the analyst asks the patient to think of something that is farthest removed from his thought, something he would never think of. By the way, this was Freud's suggestion to Theodor Reik. The patient is silent for a moment and then says: the swamps of Wutipe. It was in these far removed swamps in China that the patient's father had contracted the disease that led to his death. Months before the patient had mentioned these swamps and later forgot about it. When the analyst reminded him of it, the patient burst into tears. Now, the moment the patient mentioned the name Wutipe, he had no idea that behind this thought there lay the highly charged world of his unconscious fantasies about his father's death. Unconscious fantasy had made use of the seemingly innocuous conscious fantasy into which he was lured by his analyst.[1]
I now want to give you an example of how unconscious fantasy may operate in the analyst, again an example from Theodor Reik. The analysis of a young woman has come into a phase of stagnation. The patient cannot get over her grief for a lost relationship with a man she still loves. But the analyst has the feeling that there is more to it. Then there comes a session in which the patient mentions a toothache and tells that her dentist extracted a wisdom tooth yesterday. The cavity still aches. After a silence she points to a bookshelf and says: "There stands a book upside down." A moment it was dark in the mind of the analyst and then it flashed through his mind: She has had an abortion, performed by her lover who was a gynaecologist. The analyst, Theodor Reik, indicates that he arrived at this thought not by logical reasoning, but by way of unconscious fantasy.
Inspired by the hunch 'there is something she does not tell me', the analyst in his own unconscious fantasy understood the cavity of the extracted tooth and the book upside down as symbols of the patient's unconscious fantasies around the pregnancy and the abortion that had taken place. In this case the fantasy of the analyst proved to be correct.
One more brief illustration in closing this series of examples. On entering the home of his analyst a young man notices a house painter working in the hall. His first association is that the painter has moved listening at the door of the consulting room. The analyst immediately has the notion that there is a homosexual fantasy behind this thought. The next associations of the analysand confirm this notion.
In giving these five clinical illustrations I have tried to give some more body to the abstract formula primary process symbolization. I now want to apply this formula primary process symbolization to the psychoanalytic situation itself. Here also there is a movement from conscious to unconscious fantasy. One of the conscious meanings of the psychoanalytic situation is that of a contract in which each of the partners takes his own responsibility. An important unconscious meaning of the psychoanalytic situation consists in the relationship between the analyst as a mother who nourishes and gives security and the analysand as a child who entrusts himself to this care. This again is a case of primary process symbolization. Unconscious fantasy works with very primitive concepts of space and time. Nearness, clinging, and security stand over against distance and separation. The primitive concepts circle around presence versus absence. More specifically nearness means secure warmth or it means the threat of a devouring fusion; separation means presence at a safe distance or it means abandonment and the threat of being destructed.
This situation is so complex because the child (and later the adult) has an enduring need both of union and of separation — Ernest Becker spoke in this connection of the twin ontological motives — , both of nearness and distance. The whole course of a psychoanalysis is accompanied by this unconscious fantasy regarding the psychoanalytic situation itself. Often this fantasy needs not to be expressed, because it works as a silent factor. There are situations however, in which this fantasy must definitely be expressed. I want to give you one example.
George has entered a phase of his analysis in which he finds the silence of his analyst very irritating. For him the analyst must remain vocally in the air. During a pause of silence he shouts: "Hey man, do something for the money I pay you." He then tells that one of his friends has an analyst who constantly offers him penetrating interpretations. After a while it turns out that behind this conscious fantasy there is a quite different unconscious fantasy, namely that the silent analyst is the depressive mother of his early childhood. Unconsciously he fears that the analyst's silence can kill him or that he with his own aggressive silence has killed the analyst. The psychoanalytic situation itself is now loaded with unconscious fantasy. After the analyst has interpreted these interconnections, gradually there is a resurgence of scenes, in which the mother kept silent, when he was naughty, whereby only her eyes spoke: 'why do you cause mother to suffer so much?' Early scenes are also revived in images, e.g. my feeling is locked up in a safe after mother's eye has shut the door. This case illustrates how the psychoanalytic situation and the transference have themselves become a scene, in which scenes of childhood are revived.
With these considerations a second concept has come to the foreground: the concept of scene. In the foregoing we considered the primary process symbolization of unconscious fantasy. Fantasy expresses itself in symbols. Now it is time to consider how unconscious fantasy expresses itself in scenes. Unconscious fantasy is not only symbolized, it is also re-enacted. It may become clearer how the concepts fit together. Free association in the analytic situation entices unconscious fantasy to emerge. Analysis in general means letting a whole fall again into parts. Psycho-analysis means letting the synthesis of habits, defenses, stereotype patterns fall apart, so that the underlying unconscious fantasies are laid bare. In this process one phenomenon plays a major part: transference. When the habits and defenses are soaked loose, the fundamental scenes of the analysand's life are being re-enacted in the transference. We can term transference the re-enactment of unconscious fantasy. I shall try to clarify this constellation of concepts. But first I want to pay some closer attention to the concept of scene, which is rather hard to grasp.
I start from the original meaning of the word 'scene'. In first instance scene is the place where an act occurs; secondly scene is the act, the occurrence which takes place. The power of scene is its location, that is to say: on this site and nowhere else this one, unique event really takes place. The term scene refers to that which happens once only, to the non-returnable, it refers the individual thing, to the unique, to the historical, i.e. that which happens once in reality, it refers to the episodical, i.e. that which is clearly bounded in time and space: on this spot and in this moment this event happens.
From this it may be clear that there is a polar bound between scene and symbol. They are polar coordinates. We are concerned with the tension between the two. I had, in preparing this talk, often to think of the Christian symbol of the Crucifixion. The scene is Calvary, one only, and the symbol is the endless repeating of the scene in the mass. So scene and symbol are beautifully together. And as you know there is a whole discussion about the question: is the mass only a symbol, an imagination or it is real as Luther said? Modernity and the Middle Ages here split apart.
Symbol is not restricted to one historical event, it encompasses many things that have happened in many places and also that which will happen in the future. It transcends the site of happening. The symbol points to something elsewhere, to a reality yonder. As I will try to illustrate, symbol is the precipitation, the upshot of scene. In this sense symbol is the consequence of scene. Symbol however is also the presupposition of the condition antecedent to scene. In antithesis to the once-only, the non-returnable character of scene, symbol is repeatable; contrary to the transcendence of scene, symbol is enduring.
(1) I now want to illustrate the intricate polarity of scene and symbol in a few clinical vignettes. The first one of the reasons why Oliver came into analysis was that he repeatedly created peculiar dramatic scenes in the streets of a provincial town where his girlfriend lived. He himself did not understand why he acted so strange. More than once a provoking stimulus occurred when his girlfriend paid attention to another man. Such a drama went e.g. in the following way. His girlfriend does not appear on time in the bar they had agreed upon, but phones a bit later from another bar in town, whether he will come to her over there. There she sits with a stranger, a huge man. In such situations Oliver collapses like a jelly. When you think of the Oedipus complex, this case is a little more complicated. After a stiff and awkward conversation Oliver walks off and sits down dolefully, with his head in his hands on a windowsill of a shop in a busy street. People gather around him wanting to help him, but he remains motionless. Meanwhile like a stage director he keeps control of the whole situation up to the moment when the local police takes the matter in hand. Then Oliver suddenly explodes in a fury of accusations against the police. In Oliver's diverse drama's one element is always present. He demonstrates: "I do not partake in this false world, leave me out". You also feel the tremendous appeal of his behavior.
What is the unconscious fantasy behind the conscious fantasy of these drama's? During the analysis the central unconscious fantasy turned out to be connected with a for him catastrophic discovery in his early childhood years, namely that he was not the eldest son (as he had thought before), but that a year before his birth the real eldest son, by the same name Oliver, had lived and had died a few weeks old. The process of remembering during analysis was very painful. At first he is convinced that he had heard it not from his mother but from an aunt when he was twelve or thirteen years old. But then after a while the images of the fundamental scene came back: the room and the hour in which his mother told it to him when he was seven years old. He now remembers how he had asked two or three times whether it was really true and whether that boy had exactly the same name as his.
The case of Oliver illustrates both a decidedly traumatic scene which has taken place in childhood and a deeply buried unconscious fantasy, which determines the whole life of the person and which can never be really unshrouded. The experience is of an overwhelming and total character, so that it can only incompletely be taken up into consciousness. The fantasy circles around an elusive stranger who intimately encompasses his life. In his fantasy he is endlessly engaged in putting together broken pieces like "I am not who I am. I am the other one, but the other one is original, I am not." In the provincial drama's he had to act out the idea 'I do not exist'.
(2) In my second vignette I want to show how a more deeply repressed unconscious fantasy emerges behind less repressed unconscious fantasies. During Helen's analysis a memory comes back of an event, when she was nine years old. In the large family to which she belonged it was the custom that on Saturday afternoon all the children were washed in the bathtub. After being washed each child had its assigned task in cleaning the house and the garden. During Helen's getting undressed her mother finds in Helen's panties a note written to her by a boy in her class. In the note a droll allusion is made to the penis of the teacher. The sternly calvinistic mother is shocked. Without any further question she commands: "Go away, dirty girl, you need not help your mother this morning."
During the early years of analysis Helen experienced as the crucial scene the moment she stood in the doorway leaving the home, dazed by an incomprehensible freedom and doom. Much later in the analysis there came flashes of another scene, the one connected with the real crucial unconscious fantasy. She re-experiences the moment at the end of that Saturday afternoon, when she is standing in the little alleyway next to the house and has the hardly conscious conviction: "I cannot and will not return home." In the analysis she is now in the scene. She sees the house, the alleyway, the trees of the garden and re-experiences her inexpressible feeling. In the analytic hours she becomes conscious of the fact that a large part of her inner world had been brought to a stop that afternoon, and is only now coming to life again. In a certain sense she had not returned home. Only now she returns hone, she can enter the house and leave it.
(3) In the next vignette I want to illustrate how a scene which appears in a dream turns out to be the creative expression of a central concern of a person's life. It concerns a man whom I call Stephen. Being occupied by a vague sense of loneliness and sadness Stephen is unexpectedly struck by the following memory. He is seven years old and is sitting on the swing in the garden of his home. He enjoys the fact that his sister (three and a half years younger) is not there to push him off the swing because she wants to sit on it. But in his joy he is at the same time mixed up. In this period around his seventh year his little sister has gone to a sanatorium for epileptic children for a period of almost a year. The house is filled with an atmosphere of mourning.
By re-experiencing this childhood scene of sitting and swinging to and fro, the heretofore uncertain and obscure sense of loneliness becomes an acute pain. It is the sensuous character of the scene that overwhelms him and when he describes it he begins to cry, which is unusual for him. He relives the childhood scene: the light through the trees, the fragrance of the shrubs and the flowers, the noises from the kitchen, the swinging to and fro and through all this his mood of struggling with an insoluble riddle. He is relieved to have the place all to himself, but even now his little sister pushes him away. She fills the whole house with her very present absence. So, evidently you can never get what you want. In this scene, in which to outward appearance nothing happens, his childhood world of abandonment and overcharge is compressed. By reliving this childhood scene of being suspended on his swing and in a certain sense by living it for the first time a whole atmosphere of childhood years comes back in a way it had not done before.
I suggest that we now examine a bit more closely some characteristics of the scenes I have described. In these scenes the child is struggling with a problem that he cannot solve. As a consequence the child cannot leave the scene behind, but remains stuck in the scene and on that certain point the child has never gone any further. Regression does not return to fixation. In other words the scenes are concerned with an incomplete and unfinished reality. E.g. the room and the hour in which Oliver heard his mother reveal to him the existence of his dead brother, the alleyway in which Helen stood arrested, and the garden in which Stephen was swinging to and fro — these scenes represent a reality which remains incomplete.
Unfinished scenes keep pushing until they are finished. This phenomenon is often labeled the Zeigarnik effect, after the famous investigations of Bluma Zeigarnik in 1927, in which she demonstrated that interrupted tasks endure more in a person's memory than completed tasks. When something is finished, one can forget about it. If it is unfinished, it keeps hounding memory until it is finished. By the way, Frederick Perls got his famous concept of 'unfinished business' from Bluma Zeigarnik. The drama's which Oliver staged in the provincial town are a striking example of a hounding unfinished reality.
Unconscious fantasy, in the sense in which it is unfinished fantasy, is always looking for situations in which it can express itself. Goethe already said: "Das Unerfüllte bleibt ewig im Menschen." Unconscious fantasy carries within itself a transference readiness, an inclination towards transference. In this context one of the factors determining the central place of transference in psychoanalysis becomes clear. Unconscious fantasy is searching endlessly for persons and situations unto which it can transfer its unfinished business. But the remarkable thing is that in all this searching unconscious fantasy remains too deeply repressed to show itself directly. It manifests itself only in its derivatives. This is the tragedy of neurosis. Now, in the transference, in the psychoanalytic situation, there comes the golden chance for unconscious fantasy to enter the scene directly, and there to play its full role. Therefore in the transference unconscious fantasy can change in a way it cannot in other situations.
In this consists the specific efficacy of the psychoanalytic situation. We can clarify this a bit further by taking the dimension of time into consideration. My clinical examples made clear that the unconscious fantasy of the analysand got stuck not only in an uncompleted time, but also in a time that has been brought to a stop, in a motionless and stagnant time. A further characteristic of this form of time is that it has been split off from ordinary time so thoroughgoingly and radically, even so outrageously, that it has become a time that does not partake in ordinary life with its growth and change.
One more significant characteristic has to be mentioned. It is by ordinary means an inaccessible time, impenetrable and unyielding. Because of this, throughout the years of his life, the unconscious fantasy of the patient has been unable to change really. Transference in the psychoanalytic situation offers unconscious fantasy the particular and extraordinary opportunity to issue forth from the split off and motionless time, and to make its appearance on the stage of the psychoanalytic situation. The old time of split off fantasy takes place together with the present time of transference. Analysand and analyst are contemporaries in a deep sense. They share the exceedingly transitory, the volatile concrete time of that which happens between the two. To be able to talk about what happens between them, the very moment that it happens — that's the secret.
Transference means that the unconscious fantasy gets a second chance after the failure of the ill-fated opportunities of childhood. To uncover unconscious fantasy an opening is offered once more — and in a certain sense is offered for the first time to disclose itself and to be changed.
We noted first that unconscious fantasy expresses itself in symbols. After that we saw how unconscious fantasy expresses itself in scenes. We observed further how unconscious fantasy appears in the transference. What remains to be done is to indicate, however sketchy that may be, the interconnections between scene and symbol.
I hope that the clinical examples which I gave you have succeeded in conveying to you a feeling of the impact which a scene may have on the life of a patient. I remind you of the characteristics of scene: scene refers to that which really happens as an event in history. This implies a concrete location, the unique and individual character of the event, the once-only, i.e. the unrepeatable nature of the event. Scene is further characterized by its immediateness and its pre-reflective nature. The person is immersed in the scene, he experiences the scene as a totality, which cannot be divided up into parts. As soon as one divides it into parts one has already left the scene behind, one has moved on to an abstraction of the scene. In a scene one experiences reality as a ceaselessly flowing and fluctuating situational whole.
It will not surprise us that in a scene sensory experience plays such a large role. In sensory experience reality has a more granular and coarse structure than it has in e.g. abstract thought. During a scene reality impresses us with its substantial and massive character. In a scene we can figuratively, and sometimes literally, touch reality. When we bump into reality. we experience its force in resisting us.
I now remind you of what I said about the contrast between scene and symbol. Symbol abstracts from the reality of the scene, it transcends the concrete place of happening. Symbol comprises the sediment of this event and of many similar events. As we also saw: in contrast to the transience of scene, symbol is permanent. From the perspective of their complementary character it becomes clearer why scene and symbol are always together. The experience of the scene can be managed only if symbols order, categorize, schematize, and this inevitably also means distort the experience. From the scene, which is experienced as a totality, the symbols extricate themselves.
The power of scene is that something happens in reality. The power of symbol is that the event taking place is organized and is made tractable, so that the experience can be used in later action. While theoretically we may contrast scene and symbol as concepts opposed to each other, in practice they are inseparable, and enter into complex negotiations. Symbols play a part already in the way scenes are experienced. It is inevitable that the intangibles of the elusive totality of experience are instantaneously organized and schematized by symbols.
In the beginning I mentioned the case of the student who suddenly developed an inhibition the moment she had to speak before a microphone in an empty lecture room. This so-called simple case shows already the complexities of scene and symbol. It was the power of the scene that hit her: the unusual situation of a microphone in an empty classroom. After the evocative potency of the scene she had a fear which she did not have before. But microphone and empty room had such tremendous effects, because they instantaneously became symbols of her being condemned by an invisible God in alliance with her martyr mother. She perceived the scene in the manner of the symbols.
This togetherness of scene and symbol we can appropriately designate as being dialectic, in this sense that movement proceeds by way of opposite steps. On the one hand we have to distinguish the one step (scene) clearly from the opposite step (symbol). On the other hand the one step has no meaning apart from the opposite step. Scene and symbol are together in their separateness and they are divided in their togetherness. When one mixes them up one gets into a muddle, when one tears them apart one ends up nowhere. Already the case of the student before the microphone impressed upon us that scene is inconceivable without symbol. But over against this I want to draw your attention to the clinical examples in order to show you how very different symbol is from scene.
In the scene the mother says to Oliver: "There has been an older brother of yours, who bore the same name as you bear." In the symbol she says to him: "You have no existence of your own, you are not who you are, you are another and another is you." In the scene the mother says to Helen: "You have done something very dirty. Go away. This morning you need not help your mother." According to the symbol the mother says: "You are altogether worthless and bad, I reject you forever." In the scene this moment the mother looks very sadly at George. In the symbol she robs him of his feelings and locks them up for good. That afternoon in the garden when he was seven years old, Stephen experienced the scene of his swinging to and fro fortunately undisturbed by his little sister, but at the same time he was confused by the atmosphere of sadness in the house. But the symbol told him: "You will never get what you want, you remain forever abandoned and overcharged." It is clear that the scenes in the clinical examples I gave you produced such prodigious effects, because, among other things, in the scenes powerful symbols were at work.
This gives rise to one more rather large question, which has been implicit in my foregoing story. We may try to put it this way. In the life of a child countless scenes take place. What accounts for the fact that only a few scenes play such a crucial role in a psychoanalysis? What distinguishes these scenes from the innumerable other ones? The distinction cannot lie in the presence of scene and symbol per se. For in everything that happens to us or in us the dialectic of scene and symbol is operative. Also in small, inconsequential events we can discern the combination of scene and symbol.
So, there must be a third factor which accounts for the difference between the countless scenes of childhood and the few crucial scenes in a psychoanalysis. Once more the clinical examples shed light on this issue. In each of the illustrations we saw that the dialectic of scene and symbol was concerned with experiences of a very unusual kind, namely experiences in which the child confers a foundational meaning on his world and on himself. In these instances both scene and symbol are nodal points in which the strands of meaning whereby the child lives come together. We may summarize the nature of this third factor in the word core-experience. Here the word experience does not refer to one event but to a condensation of a number of important events.
In varying ways the clinical examples point to this state of affairs. E.g. the scene in which Oliver is told about his older brother is very different in nature from the scene in which Stephen is swinging in the garden. But they have in common that they are connected with a core-experience, by which the child gives order to his confusing world and to his own place in this world. The same applies to the student in the speech class, to George and to Helen.
The upshot of our story is that we have found three factors constituting unconscious fantasy: scene, symbol, and core-experience. I am aware that my descriptions — and this applies especially to core-experience — are very sketchy, incomplete and unsatisfactory. To illustrate this I have only to point to the time dimension of the core-experience. Core-experience is developed in the course of many years. By the succession of significant scenes and by symbols that become ever more condensed and compact the meanings whereby the child lives (this is another word for unconscious fantasy) — these meanings are endlessly worked over, organized, placed into patterns and simplified to schemata. Because of this time dimension the complexity of unconscious fantasy increases immensely. For around the scenes and the symbols of the core-experience a further organization takes place of a conglomeration of memories, feelings, fantasies and self-images.
In summary: scene, symbol, core-experience, these three constituting a time-directed organization of total experience, this makes for the complexity of unconscious fantasy. Seen in this way unconscious fantasy becomes one of the most encompassing ideas of psychoanalysis. Unconscious fantasy may be termed 'the ongoing story' of your life and mine. And with the emphasis on 'ongoing', that is to say on the infinity of new experience, I want to finish this story.
[1] Theodor Reik: Listening With The Third Ear. The Inner Experience of a Psychoanalyst (1948). New York: Pyramid Books 1964, p. 259.
