Introduction

In this chapter, the author presents some of the historical vicissitudes of the concepts of fantasy and phantasy and of their cultural context in some of the European languages. Those vicissitudes have to be considered if one wants to understand some of the characteristics of Sigmund Freud’s use of these terms and concepts and the way they have been developed and used by his followers even today. There is no doubt that “phantasy”, or “unconscious phantasy”, as it started to be used in the English translation of Freud’s work in the late 1920s and 1930s to differentiate it from “fantasy”, is one of the most important theoretical and clinical concepts of psychoanalysis. Primary and secondary processes do interact from the beginning, and affect unconscious phantasies also. Phantasies, therefore, are “the primary content of all unconscious mental processes”, according to Isaacs.