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The sort of reflection that I have been engaging in is just the sort of reflection that both Comte and Rorty see as pointless. For Comte, such reflection is a throwback to a pre-scientific age; for Rorty, a reluctance to enter fully into the postmodern one. Some of you will probaly agree with one or other of these thinkers. But in my view reflection on just what it is that makes thinkers like Rorty doubt the very idea of representing the world, and I think there is a Rorty as well as a Comte in each of us, however suppressed, is part of understanding ourselves, and not just part of understanding certain sophisticated and influential thinkers. For what is common to Rorty and Comte is the idea that much of what we think we know cannot have the status it seems to have. For Richard Rorty the recommended response is to take a more ‘playful’ attitude to what we think we know; and for August Comte it is to sternly restrict ourselves to ‘positive knowledge'

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This paper seeks firstly to grasp both conceptually and historically the different phenomenologies that are captured by the term 'Unconscious Phantasy'. The term is shown to refer to a number of distinct though overlapping conceptual domains. These include: phantasy as scene, phantasy as representation of drive, phantasy as representation of wish as its fulfilment, phantasy as split off activity of the mind functioning under the aegis of the pleasure principle; phantasy as representation of the minds own activities (which Wollheim calls' the way "the mind represents its own activities to itself''). Lastly unconscious phantasy is understood as being the basic foundation of all mental life, including drives, impulses, all anxiety situations and defences. Having mapped out this territory through following the development of the concept in the work of Freud and Klein, the author draws on the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim who, the author contends, has made a fundamental contribution to our conceptual understanding of unconscious phantasy. In the last section of the paper, the author draws a distinction between what he terms 'objects' (namely psychic objects) and what he terms 'facts'. It is suggested that this distinction, though implicit in much of our work, benefits from being made explicit and that in so doing an important dimension of analytic work is illuminated. We aim to help the patient to discover what he is like, to understand the ways in which he conceives and misconceives himself, to unravel the fact-ness of himself and his world from its 'object qualities', to differentiate between unconscious phantasy and reality.