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I APPROACHED THIS PANEL WITH THE BELIEF it would offer an opportunity to discuss a central issue in psychoanalytic theory and technique—one that in a sense defines the domain of psychoanalysis. We all know of Freud's shift early in the history of psychoanalysis from his concern with the events of the patient's life to the mental experiences that are related to those events, but that have other origins as well, origins within the patient's mind. I had thought of that shift as a shift from interest in external, objective, material reality to internal, subjective, psychic reality. Psychoanalysts have continued to be interested in both of these realities although they have not always agreed on their relation or on the appropriate analytic attitude toward each. This was to be the theme of our panel.
When I began to review Freud's writing on the subject, I learned that some of my impressions had been mistaken. I had always equated the concept of psychic reality with the inner world of subjective, personally constructed, representations and perceptions, in contrast to the "real" external world of objective things. One of the now classic metaphors I have used in teaching the concept comes from a paper by Arlow (1969a), in which he imagines two projectors showing movies on opposite sides of