ABSTRACT
The role of unconscious fantasy in mental life has been recognized as having primary importance in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Arlow explores the interaction between fantasy thinking and the perception of reality. Language furnishes many clues to the nature of unconscious daydreaming that accompanies altered experiences of the self. Freud traces the onset of neurotic illness primarily to a disturbance in the quantitative relationship between drive and defense. In his elaboration of the precipitation of neurotic illness in adult life, Arlow adds that this onset is found in the consonance between the realistic situation and the specific, unconscious fantasy which it reactivates. Arlow maintains that fixation in a childhood experience and its repetition later on in life point to the existence of an unconscious fantasy. He also states that the intrusion of fantasy upon conscious experience may, at times, be so overpowering as to seem relatively independent of the influence of perceptual data.
