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This Festschrift of essays honours Jacob Arlow, and represents a fitting legacy to his work in applying psychoanalytic insights to questions of anthropological, sociological, historical, aesthetic and political importance. The first part of this collection details some of Arlow's formidable contributions to the field of applied analysis. The remainder of the book is composed of twenty-eight essays on the subject of fantasy in the context of psychoanalytic practice, artistic creativity, cultural institutions and psychobiology. The book's four editors have compiled contributions from psychoanalysts and other kindred thinkers whose works provide evidence of the wide range of application of our theory to the human condition.
The 'red thread' throughout the series is the myriad of ways human beings have put to use their unique capacity to construct a mental world which has plasticity, timelessness and potential for being shared with others through language and artistic forms. How wishes, prohibitions and accompanying anxieties are attenuated and compromised in the distortions of the objective world in fantasy formations, and how this process becomes collectivized and institutionalized in large and small cultural traditions offers clinical material beyond the couch for the psychoanalyst's understanding.
A chapter entitled 'The Continuum of Reality, Inner and Outer', by Robert Wallerstein, reintroduces the reader to consider the basic relationships between objective perceptions of an external 'real' world of material and human objects, and our ideas and reactions to them, versus the subjective, inner world of mentally constructed reality in conscious and (arguably) unconscious thought. Arlow (1969) is cited:
Reality testing, one of the most important of the functions of the ego, is relatively easy to define but quite difficult to comprehend … Reality testing refers to the ability to distinguish between perceptions and ideas … emphasis is placed on differentiating what i