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This paper deals with the development of the sense of reality in the
light of the additions to the understanding of infantile experience which psycho-analysis owes to Mrs. Klein, Miss Searl and others who have carried out analyses on young children.
Psycho-analysis is familiar with the idea that, originally, the child's pictures of itself and of the outside world are built up by processes of introjection and projection so that, at first, they are highly fantastic and bear little resemblance to anything that does or could exist in actual fact. It has also long been recognized that many psychotic delusions and many neurotic symptoms which have reference to the inside of the body and its contents have their origin in the confusion between what is internal and what is external dating from this early stage of the development of the sense of reality which has never been outgrown and still persists in the unconscious. This paper begins with a short review of some typical clinical material taken from the symptoms of psychotic and neurotic patients which spring from fantasies about the contents of the body to which magical powers for good or evil are being attributed by the patient. The various ways in which the patient may attempt to deal with the danger arising from these 'internal objects', in so far as they are believed to be evil or poisonous or uncontrollable, are described.
The patient's belief in these 'internal objects' and his various ways of dealing with them are explained as survivals of the infantile relation to reality which belongs to a time when no sharp distinction between internal and external, self and not-self, has as yet been achieved.
An attempt is made to reconstruct what this infantile experience must be like, illustrating how it must feel to the child from the dreams of adult patients which seem to be regressions to a state somewhat resembling that of the baby at the time of teething.
It is suggested that this early experience must consist of border