The Activation of Unconscious Fantasies in Behavioral Treatments

Abstract

The learning of new responses and the deconditioning of maladaptive behaviors are identified as the principal mutative factors in behavioral treatments in most discussions found in the behavior therapy literature. In this chapter a different perspective will be offered; behavioral treatments will be discussed from the vantage point of a theoretical construct that is traditionally associated with psychoanalysis—the unconscious fantasy. The discussion will proceed as follows: A rationale for considering alternative or additional ways of accounting for behavior change in the behavior therapies will be presented. The thesis will be advanced that the construct unconscious fantasy, as it is used by psychoanalytic theorists, refers to many of the same phenomena that commonly employed constructs such as nonspecific effects, cognitive mediation, expectancies, and relationship variables do when they are discussed in the behavioral/experimental literature.