Lacan on fantasy (3 of 9): The two fantasies

Freud already noted that fantasy involved both masturbatory and more disturbing potentially traumatic elements. Lacanian notions of fantasy reiterate Freud’s idea, pointing both to a protective, stabilizing dimension of fantasy alongside the more destabilizing, ’castrating’ element. We illustrate this twofold aspect of fantasy with reference to the key preoccupations of racist fantasy. We have a clue then as to why sexuality is so important to psychoanalysis: the sexual - or the domain of jouissance - is always potentially traumatic.