Fantasy and the origins of sexuality

Abstract

Psychoanalysis has been concerned with the material of fantasy. In the initial case of Anna O., J. Breuer was apparently content to plunge into the patient’s inner world of imagination, into her “private theatre,” in order to achieve catharsis through verbalization and emotive expression. There is a circular relationship between the fantasy and the dissociation of consciousness which leads to the formation of an unconscious nucleus: fantasy becomes trauma when it arises from a special hypnoid state but, equally, the panic states it induces help to create this fundamental state by a process of autohypnosis. The origin of fantasy would lie in the hallucinatory satisfaction of desire; in the absence of a real object, the infant reproduces the experience of the original satisfaction in a hallucinated form. The fantasy of the primal scene with its character of violence shows the child’s introjection of adult erotism.