ABSTRACT
Many authors have explored the idea of phantasy and the theoretical contributions are too enormous to detail. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) provide several de®nitions of the concept:
[phantasy is an] ± imaginary scene, in which the subject is a protagonist, representing an unconscious wish in a manner that is distorted by defensive processes . . . it is not an object that the subject imagines and aims at, so to speak, but rather a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible . . . phantasy is also the locus of defensive operations . . . themselves inseparably bound up with the primary function of phantasy . . . what is prohibited is always present in the actual formulations of the wish.
