ABSTRACT
Frontiers and phantasy, frontiers of phantasy and phantasies of frontiers, are common tropes in psychoanalytic writing and in literary texts of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In Marion Milner’s later work there is no ‘frontier’ between the phantasies of the ‘mad’ and those of the artist: rather, art and phantasy are ‘framed’ as part of the same process. Crossing the frontier from the phantasies of the neurotic to those of the artist carries a certain egocentric pleasure premium for the artist. Elsewhere Anna Freud replaces this frontier with a more general metaphor; not a frame but, famously, a theatrical model underpins Freud’s thinking about phantasy. For Milner and Stevie Smith, the materiality and the artifice of totalitarian fantasy constitutes one of its most powerful seductions. When Freud returns to ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ in her 1922 paper ‘Beating Fantasies and Day-Dreams’, she too turns phantasy into a space for self-creation.
