 Even objectless (i.e., empty) intentional experiences like your thought of the winged horse Pegasus have content. On Husserl’s view, that thought simply lacks a corresponding object; the intentional act is “merely as of”, but not really of, an object. Husserl rejects “representationalist” accounts of intentionality, such as the mental image theory, according to which intentional experiences represent intra-mental pictorial representations of objects, where like other pictures such images may exist without there being a depicted object in the actual world. For Husserl, this view leads to a “false duplication” of objects represented in the veridical case; and it already presupposes what an adequate conception of pictorial representation is yet to accomplish: an explanation of what it is that makes the underlying “phantasy content”, or phantasm, “the [r]epresenting image of something or other” (Husserl 1994, p. 347; Husserliana, vol. XXII, pp. 305f). It is precisely an intentional content that does the trick here (as in all cases of intentional consciousness), according to Husserl, in a way to be explained in more detail by his phenomenology of consciousness.