A Method for Investigating Fantasies

Psychoanalysis attempts to represent the underlying dynamics of personality as an interaction of forces. Each force is a need which impels the individual person to pursue a certain course of activity—a course of activity which usually involves a certain kind of object. An inhibited or repressed force with its associated impressions of objects may manifest itself in the guise of a fantasy which the subject can report on, or its presence may be inferred by the analyst on the basis of other phenomena. In the latter case the analyst is apt to speak of it as a repressed unconscious fantasy. Since the exposition of such hidden fantasies is one of the fundamental aims of analysis and since, at best, the customary technio for accomplishing it calls for a long period of watchful waiting, it seems that it would be helpful if a more expeditious method could be devised. For, if