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Destruction of the capacity for assimilation of sense impressions is not total in any analysable patient. The non-psychotic part of the personality is associated with the continued functioning of the capacity for assimilation of sense impressions.
The word, ‘assimilation’, is not employed as a technical term.
‘Sense impressions’ here bears the ordinary meaning, but without the implications that the term carries in everyday use, and which will be seen to be specifically excluded by the theories concerned with the psychotic part of the personality.
‘Phenomenon’ and ‘thing-in-itself’ are terms used in the Kantian sense to mean things as they appear to the observer, and things as they might be supposed to be in reality without an observer.
‘Things-in-themselves’ has much the same meaning as Bradley ascribes (in Principles of Logic) to the term, ‘things in actuality’.
The term, ‘object’, is chosen partly because it carries a sense of concreteness, partly because it is sufficiently abstract to allow me to invest it with a special meaning. Yet this special meaning is difficult to convey. The patient uses a word, but his word does not name the same thing as is named by the same word used by the analyst, or even as used by the non-psychotic part of the patient's personality. He appears to feel that the word is not the name of a phenomenon nor yet the name of the thing-in-itself, but is identical with the thing-in-itself. Unfortunately, this is further complicated by the fact that the thing-in-itself seems to be regarded by the patient with the same expectation that we entertain for an idea. Thus, if someone moves a table, it is to him as if someone had interfered with his mind. It is for a word thus used that I reserve the term, ‘object’; it is identical with bizarre
objects, but I mistook their origin (see ‘The Differentiation of the Psychotic from the Non-Psychotic Personalities’, ).1
The essential point of this hypothesis is made by the words, ‘as words are ordinarily articu