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THE PRIVILEGE ACCORDED THE IMMEDIATE RETIRED PRESIDENT of the Association to address it in plenary session carries with it a corresponding obligation to select a suitably large topic whose scope warrants directing your attention to it, in the hope that a dialogue about it initiated or furthered here can lead to theoretical or empirical additions to our scientific understandings. Such a topic, I think, is the one I have chosen today, one relatively neglected or taken for granted in usual psychoanalytic discourse, namely the psychoanalytic study of reality. Although Freud's theoretical reformulations, in "The Ego and the Id" in 1923 and "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety" in 1926, into the structural theory that placed the ego at the crossroads where the drive demands of the id, the moral constraints of the superego, and the requirements of the outer reality all met and were mediated, implicitly made reality directly comparable to the intrapsychic instances in its role in mental life, the full implications of this repositioning for our theory have never been adequately remarked or more than rudimentarily developed.
Historically this circumstance is readily understandable. In its beginnings and for several decades, psychoanalysis was primarily a drive psychology—the elaboration of the vicissitudes of instinctuality in all their ramifying complexity. Not that the so-called ego