[Protofantasy].

Abstract

The author reviews Freud's postulations on proto-phantasies, and traces the evolution of several concepts related to them, in the aim of showing that there is a common purpose along the whole theoretical development: to uncover or to explain the innate archaic legacy, its role and its effects within the Psychic Apparatus of men. The first formulations of the idea of proto-phantasies in Freud's works are as early as his letters to Fliess and the Traumdeutung (1900), where it is stated the hope that the interpretation of dreams can lead to the discovery of innate elements received from ancestors. The idea is reformulated in further works, among which, "A Souvenir of Leonardo da Vinci Infant", "Totem and Tabu", and "Three Essays", "The Loss of Reality in Neuroses and Psychosis", "The History of a Child's Neurosis", Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis", "The Ego and the Id", "An Outline of Psychoanalysis", and "The Malaise in Culture". The author spots the successive developments, and proposes an order based on the everpresent assumption that man has an important legacy: the primal imagery bequeathed by the species, constituting the unconscious organized memories shared by all members of the human race. The final conclusions stress the importance of primal phantasies and the possibility that its study broadens the scope of psychoanalitic theoretical and clinical developments.