Kleinian psychoanalysts regard the unconscious as made up of fantasies of relations with objects. These fantasies are the mental representation of instincts, and hence are thought of as primary (Isaacs, 1948).

When Freud (1900a) stressed the psychological meaning of childhood trauma, rather than its reality, he moved from a physiological way of thinking to a psychological one, thereby giving priority to the internal world. His paradigm of the psychological world was the unconscious fantasy of the three-person constellation that he named the Oedipus complex. Freud contrasted such internal libidinal fantasizing (the Oedipus complex) with the desexualized fantasy that serves as the basis for launching new sorts of sublimated activity in a wide domain. The role of fantasy in sublimating libido in such activities as daydreaming and aesthetic creation is quite different from the primary unconscious fantasies that provoke the...