ABSTRACT
The viewing of psychological processes from the vantage point of object relations has often been contrasted with the view stressing unconscious wish-fulfillment, and indeed violent and often strident ideological battles have been waged in psychoanalytic circles over this very issue. Conscious fantasy was simply the wish-fulfilling conscious day-dream, but the term unconscious fantasy had a variety of meanings. The term unconscious is used in a purely descriptive sense, because unconscious fantasy thoughts involve organized thinking at a variety of levels of complexity. Within the traditional theoretical framework of psychoanalysis, the persons towards whom the impulses are directed, either in fantasy or reality, are the objects of the drives—hence, of course, the term object relationships. Such object relationships have been accounted for in classical psychoanalytic theory in terms of the investment of the object with instinctual drive energy, either in its original crude state or in a neutralized, purified or sublimated form.
