ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan defines phantasy as ‘the image set to work in the signifying structure’, and he rebukes Melanie Klein and her followers for confusing phantasy with imagination: they would avoid this misconception if they were alert to ‘the category of the signifier’. Susan Isaacs supposedly provides the metapsychological foundations of a Kleinian theory of phantasy. She argues that phantasies express ‘the specific content’ of the earliest ‘urges’ and ‘feelings’ of the infant. The phantasy situates one’s position in relation to the desire of the mother, and the particular object chosen will no doubt be linked to the preferences of the mother. When Klein writes about the child’s attacks on the mother’s body, one may understand it in the simple sense of the attempt to make the body of the mother lack something, to emphasise the mother not as all-powerful and omnipotent but as lacking something.
