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The papers in this section offer us a variety of ways to think about disillusionment and the illusions that necessarily precede and give rise to it. My hope is that the reader will consider each paper interdependently with the others. Rather than offering the individual discussion each paper warrants, my comments will treat these four papers as something of a cluster. I will highlight some of the papers' salient contributions, and conclude by discussing the presence of illusionment and disillusionment in the contemporary American scene.
Placing illusion at the center of creative thought and psychic health, Stephen Seligman focuses on its foundational, generative aspects. He emphasizes the role of illusion in allowing us to believe that what we create really exists. “Adequate infant care,” he writes, “protects the baby from being anxious about her needs being met or the possibility that her environment might let her down. … the parents' care allows the baby to be carefree” (p. 269). Debunking illusion can be dangerous, he says. He argues for the primary place of illusion, not as a regression moving us away from reality, but as a vital psychic capacity. He treats illusion as something to perpetuate, something to sustain throughout the life cycle.
Our other authors see it differently.
Jane Tillman's emphases darken the picture of illusion. She argues that, regardless of the necessity of illusion, one's actual capacity to live in reality demands the ability to sustain disillusion. For Tillman, illusion functions to cover over the incurable wound at the heart of human experience, a wound that is always there and must be faced. Contextualized within a review of psychoanalytic developmental theories of disillusion, Tillman's paper offers a series of vignettes from a research study of participants who have survived a near lethal suicide attempt. One aim of the