ABSTRACT
Italo Calvino (1988), a great writer of the cultural tradition to which I belong, wrote that simplifications are extremely dangerous and should be avoided. I would agree with this statement. Indeed, I have been given very little space to comment on this complex and dense text by Werner Bohleber and his colleagues. Furthermore, I have been given too little time to study and write some plausible notes. Therefore, the task to answer such a rich and inevitably complicated paper has been quite difficult. I am compelled to simplify enormously what I want to say, and I am not even sure I have understood all that Werner and his colleagues have written. Instead of being able to expand on their statements, sometimes I will have to ask Werner to answer, if he can, some of my own questions. I must apologize for any inevitable misunderstandings. First of all, I would like to touch on two general issues. I think they have to
be mentioned in order to better understand what we are trying to speak about. I quite accept that the first issue I want to raise and remind you of could be
considered to be, if not my ‘pathology,’ then at the very least an idée fixe of mine. I am interested in the history of psychoanalysis and its concepts, and the history of psychoanalysis is not always a very popular approach to our discipline. Yet, I hope my approach can lead to something that is worth considering. Die Phantasie and Traumphantasie are concepts which belong to the prehistory
of psychoanalysis. These terms do not belong so much to the natural sciences, but rather to German romantic philosophy and literature. This means that they belong to a tradition that had filtered into the German culture of the 18th and 19th centuries through texts and commentaries from the European Renaissance and from the period of the Baroque. Always linked to strong feelings and emotions or desires, the cultural roots of these terms in Western culture can be traced as far back as Ancient Greece. Just think of Plato, not to mention the later neo-platonic, Plotinus.1
