ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the nature and function of phantasy as a whole, and its place in the mental life. The mental life involves the study of the earliest phases of mental development, that is during the first three years of life. Awareness of the way in which the content and form of phantasy at any given time are bound up with the successive phases of instinctual development, and of the growth of the ego, is always operating in the analyst's mind. The relation between the oral phantasies of incorporation and the earliest processes of introjection has been discussed by Anna Freud in his essay on 'Negation'. But Freud's discoveries soon led him to recognize the existence of unconscious phantasies. Freud discovered that patients repeat towards their analyst situations of feeling and impulse, and mental processes generally, which have been experienced earlier on in their relationships to people in their external lives and personal histories.
