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THIS PANELS TOPIC—WHOSE REALITY IS IT ANYWAY?—may seem a bit flip, but often that's how we treat intimidating problems. It's not only that reality is a complex problem, but also that what's real, what are the facts, is frequently downright unpleasant, and sometimes unendurable. Given some of the faces of reality, the question might well be not whose is it? but who wants it? However unpleasant—especially as it involves our sense of self—we can't get away from it, so people expend a vast amount of ingenuity blurring, distorting, disposing of and otherwise tampering with reality. The unremitting problem of resistance in analysis merely reflects how racking it can be to deal with what reality mirrors.
Psychoanalysis, as a very human science has participated in the altogether human tendency to get away from reality. It may seem strange but psychoanalysis, in the course of its history, has raised the question of whether material reality matters. Freud's answer appears to be yes, but not really.
In the case of "The Psychogenesis of Homosexuality in a Young Woman, " for example, Freud (1955b) describes incisively family conditions (external realities) that bear heavily upon her, yet these are put aside or at best subordinated to the determinative power of internal conditions, drives and fantasies arising out of the biology of the species. "Phantasies, " he writes elsewhere (1955a) "possess psychical as contrasted to material reality and we gradually learn that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality which is the decisive kind" (p. 368). Fantasy thus became the primary focus of many theorists such as Klein, Arlow, Ricoeur and others and for them it followed that the work requires a minimization of