“If I Were You”: A Phantasy in Two Parts

Abstract

Ever since Freud turned to myth, literature, tragedy, art, and studies of the creative writer, psychoanalysts have drawn upon aesthetic objects as exemplars of the caches of emotional life, the fate of the subjunctive mood and, too, for affectations that drive and may destroy the elusive search for beauty, truth, and poetic knowledge. In one of his most imaginative essays, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” Freud (1908) tipped his hat to the creative writer with the request for readers to remember their earliest play with reality. It was his most extensive discussion of the links among phantasies, imagination, and play. Phantasies, Freud suggested, compose three registers of time: current impressions touch upon traces of an earlier wish, then onto a forgotten memory, and finally “create a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of a wish” (Freud 1908, p. 147). While Mrs. Klein held to the heteronomy of phantasy as regressive, retroactive, and projective, she extended phantasy as a mental constellation and organization of anxiety, adding, as unconscious expressions, the volley between drives and object relations. We know in her psychoanalysis with children that Klein interpreted the child’s play as expressing anxieties (both hostile and loving phantasies) over the contents of the sensate body that somehow enacted birth, death, parental intercourse, and the cruelty of the superego (Spillius et al. 2011). Her later work, however, asked not only whether our earliest beginnings contained the innate capacity for object relations that occur just as frustrations take hold. She went further to propose a universal desire for the good object as the basis for creative life, moral psychology, and as a means to symbolize the human sense of loneliness, grief, and loss. Phantasy will now carry the glimmers of a second purpose. The good object was, for Klein, an aesthetic container and the breast remained the primal phantasy needed for semblance. There remains the matter of Kleinian relational ethics that emerge from the dynamic workings of phantasies as they play in the human situations of envy, reparation, and gratitude. Again, the work of mourning will be her model for understanding the depth and fate of infantile depression as well as our capacity for symbolization. We also want to ask why Klein turned to aesthetic models as her means to convey some of her most affecting concepts: the urge for reparation, projective identification and, envy and gratitude.