In the course of a discussion of Klein's child analysis of Dick, Lacan complains that Klein lacks a ‘theory of the imaginary’ (Seminar I, p. 82). This is of course true, in that Klein does not give an explicit philosophical account of what it is for something to be imaginary (which suggests that Lacan is, characteristically, placing inappropriately philosophical demands on psychoanalytic theory: see pp. 202–6). But Lacan's more specific charge is that Kleinian attributions of phantasy can not sustain themselves outside of Lacan's own theory of the orders of the symbolic and the imaginary, which stems from his general theory of the mind's relation to language.

Leaving aside the details of Lacan's theory, it may be noted that, for Lacan's objection to be good, a demonstration that the attribution of phantasy is somehow a function of linguistic activity would be needed. The difficulty that confronts any such argument – for anyone, like Klein, with a realistic view of phantastic content – is that it will prove too much, by showing that there is no ‘content’ to phantasy except that which is created by the subject's interaction with the mind of the psychoanalyst-interpreter. And this is indeed a consequence that Lacan is prepared to accept: ‘the unconscious is the discourse of the other. Here is a case where it is absolutely apparent. There is nothing remotely like an unconscious in the subject.