Primal Scene Fantasies Research Articles

Creativity and oedipal fantasy in Austen's Emma: 'An ingenious and animating suspicion'.

Austen's Emma is one of the great novels of the Western tradition. In this paper the author explores the meaning of Emma's 'ingenious and animating suspicion' that Jane Fairfax seduced her best friend's husband, Mr Dixon. The interpretation that a psychoanalytic understanding makes possible shows how this suspicion represents an oedipal fantasy projected on to Miss Fairfax. Further exploration demonstrates how the fantasy is linked both to Emma's systematic unkindness to Jane Fairfax and to Emma's famous insult to Jane's aunt, Miss Bates. Emma's suspicion projects an oedipal fantasy with its incestuous impulses on to her rival and satisfies an envious aggression at the same time. The author's purpose in this paper is to bring to light through psychoanalytic understanding Austen's dramatisation of the complexity and creativity of the oedipal situation. In addition to the regression in oedipal fantasy, the primary process also functions with a progressive quality that expands and enriches the ego, a double movement described in Keats's 'negative capability', which has been elaborated by Bion. The primal-scene fantasies are often brought alive in the analytic transference. These situations and painful emotions are dramatically portrayed through Austen's genius as vehicles for change. A sudden integration follows a phase of disorganization: 'It darted through her with the speed of an arrow. Mr Knightley must marry no-one but herself'. Emma, who is Austen's 'imaginist', moves from the projected fantasy of the sad love triangle through envy aggression and the narcissistic blows of self-doubt and loss of love to moments of illumination and connection.

Terminators, Monkeys and Mass Culture

This article is concerned with time in science fiction films. Our contention is that the current fascination with the time travel motif can be understood in terms of an oppositional cultural narrative running counter to dominant forms of temporality within capitalism. Such a reading allows us to negotiate the wide (mass) appeal of films based on the time travel motif without resorting to the primal scene fantasy. Our argument challenges the views which dismiss mass culture as merely escapist. Specifically, we argue that the potentially subversive element of time travel films lies precisely in a particular conceptualization and experience of time and history as cyclical and in flux. This understanding of time is antithetical to the temporalities generated within late capitalist societies where time emerges as both linear and fragmented. Through the reading of films such as 12 Monkeys, Terminator and others we attempt to show that time in this context entails a possibility of intervention in history (both personal and social) and is presented as non-linear and non-teleological.

Primal scene derivatives in the work of Yukio Mishima: the primal scene fantasy.

This article discusses the preoccupation with fire, revenge, crucifixion, and other fantasies as they relate to the primal scene. The manifestations of these fantasies are demonstrated in a work of fiction by Yukio Mishima. The Temple of the Golden Pavillion. As is the case in other writings of Mishima there is a fusion of aggressive and libidinal drives and a preoccupation with death. The primal scene is directly connected with pyromania and destructive "acting out" of fantasies. This article is timely with regard to understanding contemporary events of cultural and national destruction.

The Analysis of a Pre-Adolescent Girl with Primal Scene Fantasies

This paper presents the analysis of Daphne, a ten-year-old girl whose prominent primal scene fantasies organized the analytic process in a rather unusual way, creating challenging technical problems and offering the analyst the opportunity to learn more about the formation of primal scene fantasies and their potential impact on psychic development and function. The data are consistent with the view that primal scene fantasies become organized in response to the cognitive requirements of development--to answer the enigmas of sexual difference, genital sensations, procreation, and parental rejection; that these fantasies arise from phase-specific libidinal and aggressive struggles such as voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and homoerotic fantasy; and that they influence superego development. Daphne, however, appeared to have used the primal scene fantasy in a rather extraordinary way to organize and integrate the vicissitudes of development and especially to master conflict. Moreover, the analytic work demonstrates the technical difficulty of distinguishing between primal scene fantasy and primal scene exposure. Another technical issue was raised by the remarkable discrepancy between this little girl's relatively high functioning behavior and demeanor both in school and at home, and the outpouring of sexual material that emerged and flooded our sessions. Why was there such a discrepancy? How should I manage the sexualized nature of the material? Several colleagues, reflecting on the overstimulated quality of the analytic productions, questioned whether I "should have done something" to stop it. In the hours, I certainly felt perplexed by the discontinuity between her presentation and her fantasies. Thus, I ask the reader to follow me in the process of uncovering the particular way in which the analytic data revealed themselves.

The Written Dream: Action, Resistance, and Revelation

There is a large body of literature that focuses on acting out, but there is little literature on a clear action in analysis, the written dream. The literature that does exist describes and determinants primarily. This paper, with a clinical vignette at its center, calls attention to primal scene fantasies and wishes as one major impetus to the presentation of a written dream. The central theoretical point is to link Lewin's idea of analysis as a dream with the written dream as an action which invites the analyst into the dream.

Primal Scene Fantasies and Cathexis of Self as Reflected in the Psychoanalytic Situation

(1981). Primal Scene Fantasies and Cathexis of Self as Reflected in the Psychoanalytic Situation. The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 75-93.