Jumping from the couch: an essay on phantasy and emotional structure.
This paper addresses two questions: first, how do phantasies work? Second, how do these mental activities affect a person's overall emotional life? The first question tends to be overlooked since those who accept, for example, projective identification as a basic mental activity tend also to treat it as an explanatory primitive. On this view, there is no further question to ask about how projective identification itself works; rather, other psychological and emotional phenomena are explained in terms of it. By contrast, this paper asks, how does projective identification itself work? The aim is not to provide a reductive explanation but to ask how it is that phantasies have the efficacy they have. To that end, one moment in the analysis of the Rat Man is re-examined. There is then an attempt to show the difficulties involved in weaving an account of phantasy into the broader-scale interpretation of emotional life.
Lear
Jonathan
J
Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago, IL 60637, USA. jlear@uchicago.edu
D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D004644:Emotions; D005201:Fantasy; D005619:Freudian Theory; D006801:Humans; D007062:Identification, Psychological; D011385:Projection; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy / Q000379:methods*