ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the function of ideal images in clinical healing and self-formation. It describes a more theoretical exploration of the meaning and place of ideal images in psychoanalytic writings and clinical work. The proliferating complexity of fantasy life is often linked to a multiplicity of self-images or facets of self-images. Instinctual fantasy and symptoms were used as means to expose more pervasive problems rooted in basic feelings about James and others. James's capacity to create ideal experience had become impaired owing to destructive aspects of his relations to his parents. Work with phallic fantasy led to the repair of certain aspects of James's self-image and to a genuine gain in potency. E. Erikson's concern with phallic initiative and self-assertion is only one aspect of the general theme involving personal potency, ultimately creative potency. In James's case the emergence of symbolic phallic object constancy appeared to be a necessary condition for genuine potency.
