ABSTRACT
Mrs A had been suffering for more than thirty years from very tormenting, shame-inducing obsessive thoughts. She found her obsessive thoughts aggressive and gruesome–on the one hand, lines, knives, and similar objects constituted a threat against her own bodily integrity; on the other hand, knives were stabbing into the pregnant bellies of others. The processes the analyst has described are, of course, bound up with the infant's phantasy-life; and the anxieties which stimulate the mechanism of splitting are also of a phantastic nature. In a certain way, the first drawing might remind us of S. Freud's initial use of the term splitting in terms of conscious and unconscious experience. Whereas in analyst’s view M. Klein understands psychic reality as equivalent to phantasy, Freud's grappling with the term phantasy extends from understanding it on the one side as solely being tied to the pleasure principle to, on the other side, as a notion of primal phantasies.
