ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the early stages of the development of unconscious phantasy seen as the very origin of thinking. In order to do so he first briefly reminds the reader of some of Dr. Freud's statements and the extensions made by Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion and a vignette of a young girl whose rich phantasy work will give a background to contrast with the cases of two severely disturbed boys the author presents in the clinical section. Both boys' precarious psychic functioning may help illustrate the oscillation between an arrest and the dawn of unconscious phantasy. Bion, as Freud, maintains that people are born with some innate phantasies or set of predispositions to make sense of actual experiences. Freud called these primal phantasies and thought of them as phylogenetic memories. The purpose of this contribution is to focus on the conditions needed for unconscious phantasy to be called into existence, and its impairments and oscillations.
