ABSTRACT
Boys' Love (BL) is an umbrella term for a cluster of genres originating in early 1970s Japanese popular culture which portray male-male sexuality largely by and for women. BL manga in commercial translation usually takes the form of books bringing together stories under the name of a single mangaka which appeared as one-shots or as longer serialisations in Japanese magazines. Melanie Klein provides one of the most influential accounts of the psychology of the earliest months of life, pieced together from her analysis of disturbed older children and adults. The world is therefore split in the infant's phantasy into the all-providing good object and the persecuting bad object. This splitting is a schizoid defence mechanism which keeps the good object on which the infant's wellbeing depends safe from the dangerous bad object. The spelling phantasy' is used to connote that this process is primarily the work of the unconscious aspects of the ego.
