ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between fantasying, imagination and thinking, as they have been evident in the psychoanalytic treatment of Peter, a ten-year-old boy. It discusses how, over the course of fifteen months, the quality of Peter’s play changed from an essentially narcissistic and uncommunicative "fantasying" to imaginative fantasy. A central question in the psychoanalytic theory of fantasy is whether it serves the function of integration of the different levels of the mind, or whether it is used to escape psychic reality. Psychoanalytic theories of thinking locate its development in the space opened up by the mother’s failure to satisfy the infant constantly. Ron Britton and Michael Feldman have both linked disorders of thinking, the incapacity to gain perspective and link together ideas and thoughts in a creative intercourse, to the failure of an oedipal triangular mental space.
