ABSTRACT
dr. c’s story is an example of how trauma becomes transmitted from one generation to the next, how it becomes entombed in fantasy, and how that fantasy and its entombment can become embedded in erotic play. Historical calamity is seen to impinge on a boy’s fantasy life in a way that is revealed disturbingly some 50 years later. The psychoanalytic situation offers access to the underlying unconscious fantasies, both the initial attempts at the formulation of a coherent narrative and the secondary elaboration of what I call a facultative or play enabling fantasy, and to their subsequent detoxification. Such therapeutic intervention allows for a restoration of the hitherto deformed play function, of the capacity to remember what could not be recalled, and of a greater ability to appreciate meaning and mean what one appreciates.
