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A paper by Dr Samuel Abrams entitled ‘Fantasy and reality in the oedipal phase: a conceptual overview’ was pre-circulated to all participants. The following summary of Dr Abrams’ paper was prepared by Mr George Moran.
Fantasizing, the active initiation of wish-fulfilling ideas, may be assumed to be present once there is a certain degree of differentiated ego development. Empirically, fantasies can vary from peremptory primary process visual images of near hallucinatory intensity to more orderly narratives cast in words, bound by logic, interwoven with memories, used sometimes for purposes of defence, and including percepts derived from several sense impressions. Primary process forms are not exclusively tied to the more ancient impulses. Actively evoked fantasies, co-ordinating wishes and events from earlier and later stages, may also be organized along primary process modes, while some archaic wishes can be extraordinarily elaborated. This pliability of form and content is so pervasive that the level of psychological functioning is not necessarily reflected in either the manifest appearance of the fantasies or their state of organization.
The conceptual view of reality is burdened by differing definitions, by the empirical observation that perceptual, cognitive and organizational endowments vary widely among persons; by the complexities introduced by the conceptual discovery that reality undergoes progressive differentiation over time even as it is buffeted about by drives and the environs as it does so; and by the requirement that all persons integrate imposed and discovered realities as well as past and present ones.
In establishing the distinction between material and psychic reality, Freud defined the former as the world outside of the psychic apparatus, including, therefore, the soma and physiological processes. This definition, especially useful for theory-building, contrasts the obvious feature of reality's periodic stimuli that can be ‘avoided by flight’ with