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THE UNDERLYING THEME OF THIS paper is that struggles for proprietorship of the terrain of reality are not so much a matter of intellectual discourse, but instead reflect different means of coping with wish and disillusionment.
For some time I have been struck by the fervor with which many patients use the pretense of "being realistic" in order to shield precious, often "unrealistic" wishes from disillusionment. It seems often that an enormous psychic effort is required before these patients can express their wishes overtly without disclaimers such as, "But that will never happen, " or "That's not realistic." When the patient is finally able to voice a deeply held wish, and in the next breath adds, "Okay, so what do I do now?" we see how the previously defensive preoccupation with reality concerns quickly gives way to a call to some action toward the fulfillment of the wish. For the patient, the use of pragmatism had been defensively superimposed upon the wishes tucked away in the unconscious. These unconscious wishes, unmodified by the processes of genuine disillusionment and mourning, remain inextricably intertwined with their fulfillment in external reality. Freud (1911) noted that "unconscious processes equate reality of thought with external actuality, and wishes with their fulfillment" (p. 225).
Paralleling this sense of unconscious fluidity between wish and fulfillment is also a fluidity between thought and action, and between