FANTASY, DEFENSE, AND THE REPRESENTATIONAL WORLD

This paper discusses the manipulation of mental representations, parti cularly in relation to the psychoanalytic concepts of conscious or unc onscious fantasy. A distinction is made between the unconscious phenom enal (experiential) aspect of representations and the nonexperiential, quasi-structural aspect. The concept of the representational world is described and elaborated, and its development is seen as a consequenc e of the infant's interaction with itself and the external world. Proc esses such as identification and projection can be seen in terms of ch anges in self and object representations, and the same is true for all the mechanisms of defense. The content of unconscious wishes is trans formed, by use of such mechanisms, into representations that are accep table to consciousness. Major transformations of unconscious represent ational content occur in the process of creating unconscious (preconsc ious) fantasy, and further transformations are frequently needed befor e such (preconscious) fantasies are permitted access to consciousness. The concept of projective identification is considered in the light o f the ideas put forward in the paper.