5 August 1959: α. Cogitations

Frustration, according to Freud, enforces the installation of the reality principle (‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ [1911b], pp. 218-226). But the psychotic with his hatred of reality evades the installation of the reality principle. His intolerance of frustration makes for intolerance of reality and contributes to his hatred of reality. This leads to reinforcement of projective identification as a method of evacuation. This in turn leads to dreams that are evacuations, not introjectory operations – hence ‘dreams’ of the psychotic, which are really evacuations of such α as he has been unable to prevent. The dream-elements in the psychotic dream are really the discarded residue of α-elements that have survived mutilations of α.

Thus, in the psychotic we find no capacity for reverie, no α, or a very deficient α, and so none of the capacities – or extremely macilent capacities – which depend on α, namely attention, passing of judgement, memory, and dream-pictures, or pictorial imagery that is capable of yielding associations.

But this in turn means that he destroys the capacity for thought which is essential to action in reality and which makes bearable the frustration – an essential concomitant of the interval between a wish and its fulfilment. So the psychotic's attempt to evade frustration ends in producing a personality more than ever subject to frustration without the softening or moderating mechanism that would have been available through α and thought. In consequence he is more than ever intolerant of a frustration that is more than ever intolerable. And thus a self-perpetuating situation is created in which more and more frustration is produced by more and more effort devoted to its evasion by the destruction of the capacity for dreaming which, had he retained it, might have enabled him to moderate frustration.

How does a dream evade frustration? By distortion of facts of reality, and by displacement of facts of reality. In short, by dr