ABSTRACT
Fantasies, like dreams, cast configurations of experience into concrete perceptual images. Fantasies can subserve the entire gamut of psychological functions encountered in clinical psychoanalytic work-wish-fulfilling, defensive and self-punishing. Daydreams or fantasies, like any content of experience, can undergo repression when they, or the affective states they concretize, are perceived to endanger a tie that is required for psychological survival. However, the concept of unconscious fantasy has been expanded to encompass much more psychological territory than Freud's notion of a repressed or dynamically unconscious daydream. An analogous function may be served by certain types of enactment through which a person attempts to articulate experiences that could never be encoded symbolically. In such instances, the concrete sensorimotor images of the fantasy dramatize and reify the person's emotional experience, conferring upon it a sense of validity and reality that otherwise would be absent. The phrase unconscious fantasy is being employed imprecisely to refer to the unconscious organizing principles constituting the domain of unconsciousness.
