Childrens Phantasies: The Shaping Of Relationships

CHILDREN'S PHANTASIES 0.Weininger CHILDREN'S PHANTASIES The Shaping of Relationships 0.Weininger Karnac Books London First published in 1989 by H. Karnac (Books) Ltd. Karnac Books 58 Gloucester Road 118 Finchley Road LondonNW3 SW75HT 4QY London Copyright @ 1989 by Otto Weininger All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, by any process or technique, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Weininger, Otto Children's phantasies: the shaping of relationships. 1. Children. Development. Role of fantasies. I. Title 155.4'18 ISBN978 0-946439-54-0 ISBN 0 94643 954 6 Printed inGreat Britain by A . Wheaton&Co.. Ltd., Exeter CONTENTS Foreword Hanna Segal ix Preface xv Acknowledgements xix Introduction PART ONE Good, bad and enough: some basic processes in the paranoid-schizoid position 1. Splitting and idealization 9 2. Feeling good, having enough and not fearing the other 27 PART TWO Aggression, expression and love: development through the depressive position 3. Aggression and regression 39 4. Symbol formation, symbolic equation and the development of interests 53 5. Reparation and restoration 69 PART THREE Anxiety and independence: the Oedipal position and the emergence of the sufficient ego 6. An uneasy bedtime and two bad mornings: some anxieties of the early Oedipal 7. Achieving an independent self: some problems of adolescence PART FOUR Feeling, thought and creativity: the interdependence of phantasy and learning 8. Psychotic moments, thinking and reasoning 119 9. Reparation, sublimation, learning and play with art materials 135 PART FIVE Play psychotherapy: theory and practice 10. Some basic patterns of play psychotherapy 157 CONTENTS 11. The snake family: excerpts from play psychotherapy sessions with a ten-year-old boy References Index ~ i i 185 FOREWORD Hanna Segal T he concept of unconscious phantasy is one of the earliest and most fundamental concepts in psychoanalysis. Freud first refers to phantasy in a letter to Fliess, and throughout his letters to Fliess and drafts for his papers on hysteria he ponders on the relation between phantasy, memory, dreams and symptom formation. Originally he considers phantasy as a defence against memory. Gradually his view extends to phantasy being a defence against reality as well as against memory. He also mentions that sometimes phantasy is promoted by impulses. He comes to see it as underlying and being embodied in hysterical symptoms and also as playing a fundamental role in the aetiology of all neuroses. But, unlike later workers, he sees unconscious phantasy as appearing fairly late in mental development. For instance, in the 'Formulations on the Two hinciples of Mental Functioning' (1911b)he says: With the introduction of the reality principle one mode of thought activity was split off; it was kept free from X FOREWORD reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle. This activity is phantasizing. He also sees that unconscious phantasy plays a part in artistic creativity, but it is unclear in his writing to what extent he considered phantasy as a fundamental part of development, active and evolv