CAN BABIES FANTASIZE

The author develops a three-stage theory of mental processes. In his v iew the first psychic imprints take the farm of sensory-motor schemata (Piaget), perception-affect-action patterns (Lichtenberg) and general ized representations of interaction (Stern). At the age of one-and-a-h alf, mental activity begins to exist in the form of the ability to fre ely evoke images. In this way the child is able to transcend reality a nd to think in terms of things which are absent or have never really e xisted. At this stage active imagination sets in, combining the real a nd the possible. The closing stage of this development is the linguist ic encoding of the mental. The author suggests reserving the term >> f antasy << for the second and third stages and discusses the implicatio ns of this proposal for the concept of unconscious fantasy.