Facts or Fantasies:—On the Nature of Psychoanalytic Data1

IN THE FOURTH CENTURY B.C. a Taoist monk, Chuang Tsu, wrote a now famous parable:

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tsu, dreamed I was a butterfly, flying happily here and there. Suddenly I woke up and I was indeed Chuang Tsu. Did Chuang Tsu dream he was the butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Chuang Tsu? (Feng & English 1974).

This may seem a rather esoteric way to start a presentation on the data of psychoanalysis, but the question is germane. Who dreams the dream? Does the dream perhaps dream the dreamer? My thesis is that it is precisely this issue which lies at the core of a major psychoanalytic schism, one with profound and perhaps irreconcilable consequences for our understanding of the process of therapy and the very nature of change, itself.

We would all agree that symbolization, in its divers manifestations (dreams, fantasies, the patient's representation of events, even language, itself), mirrors actual events. But when there is distortion, when an evident gap exists between real events and their symbolic representation, does the distortion reflect an attempt to grapple with a poorly comprehended reality; or, is the reality only a jumping-off point for an autonomous fantasy process, internally drive and motivated? It is on this point that the intra-psychic and interpersonal analysts differ most sharply.

As Lester Havens put it:

… according to interpersonal theory, the presence of the people in the room and the anxious responses to them have been learned. Introjects have