Klein’s concept of unconscious fantasy expands Freud’s theory of the mechanisms of defense. During the controversial lectures in London, Susan Isaacs provided convincing evidence that phantasies, along with the impulses from which they arise, and are ctive in the infant long before they are able to be symbolically or verbally represented. Isaacs suggested that phantasies are initially as bodily sensations or actions. Consequently, when we reveal an unconscious phantasy, we discover a psychic fact or a dynamic aspect of internal reality. 

The infant, in a position of maximal vulnerability and minimal capability, employs phantasy as a means of defense, for the inhibition and control of instinctual urges, for the expression of wishes and desires, and for their fulfillment.

The omnipotent quality of a phantasy is directly proportional to the degree that the infant experiences its vulnerability. In other words, as primitive anxieties increase, the phantasies that constitute the pre-historic, self-survival tactics of infancy develop, employing the senses, the viscera, and the bodily organs in the service of expression.

Bick observed that the form taken by these primitive phantasies in infancy is, in part, inherited from the mother; in other words, Mother’s own unconscious phantasies, projected into the infant from birth, combine with its innate infantile ‘preconceptions’ and sensitivities to create the primordial basis of the infant’s own phantasies, even before birth. In other words, Mother’s phantasies provide the alpha-bet from which the infant begins to spell-out the meaning of its life experience. The form and shape of Mother’s phantasies are passed on in the womb through what Rosenfeld called osmotic pressure, and after birth through Mother’s milk.

Further on, I will demonstrate how this notion can be brought to bear upon the issue of symptom choice in somato-mental illness.  However, given the importance of primitive anxieties in the development of mental life, I will recap these next.