Is there a Psychologically Real?

I ASK THIS QUESTION aware that the "psychologically real" is a deliberate oxymoron. The psychological refers to how we see things, our outlooks or perspectives, while the real refers to what is beyond any particular perspective, if only because no perspective can include everything. The artist Magritte called attention to the difference: this is not a pipe but a picture of a pipe. On the other hand, Cezanne implied he did not want to paint pictures but to be like nature and make apples; why not, he said, since he was part of nature? The problem is also a clinical one if we do not want to give accounts of patients, describing how they conform to this or that idea, but to reach the patients themselves.

The problem gains immediacy when the patient does not "seem real." Imposters and "as if" personalities refer to the most discussed examples of this possibility; yet among "false personalities, " to use Winnicott's term, appear the commonest instances. As soon as the idea of psychological disguises or character armor gains currency and with it the idea of a truer part, the psychologically real presents as a problem in recognition and recovery.

It presents theoretically in such ideas as "being true to oneself." The self has an ambiguous status in psychoanalytic theory, sometimes being merely a fantasy of the ego, so that "true to oneself" means being true to a fantasy. Or the self may refer to a supraordinate structure so that being true to this larger self carries greater weight. I have argued elsewhere (Havens, 1986) that the ego finds its self in the superego and ego ideal, that is, in the values, aspirations, and prohibitions it makes its own, with the result, a self to which one is true or not. In reply it can be said these are merely fantasies of the good or bad to which we may or may not adhere. For myself, I find this language inadequate to the problem of psychological ownership, the experience of going from an ego which mediates among forces to a self w