Psychic Reality: Its Impact On The Analyst And On The Patient Today

Pre-published Papers for the 39th IPA Congress, San Francisco, 1995

Chair, Programme Committee

The main theme of this Congress was chosen to encourage pluralism as well as to stimulate the development of new ideas compared with the more classic ones.

‘Psychic Reality: Its Impact on the Psychoanalyst and on the Patient Today’, offers us the opportunity for a new exploration of a concept of general interest, the presence and importance of which in our everyday activities is unquestionable. It has been said that ‘psychic reality’ and its relation to ‘objective or material reality’ is one of the central issues that, in a sense, define psychoanalysis. We believe, therefore, that it will be of great value to re-examine psychic reality and its relation to material reality in new ways and from different and current perspectives and frames of reference. We are confident that doing so will lead to extensions and new understanding, both clinically and theoretically.

The theory that the universe is expanding, subscribed to by many present-day scientists, may be applied, metaphorically, to what is happening in the realm of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic universe is also expanding, with the addition of important theories that are being incorporated into the basic pre-existing ones. While based on Freud's discoveries, Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann and Melanie Klein have added great new dimensions, and both aspects, the connection with the old and the opening of the new, are important. Theories involving original elements are constantly arising, some of which can open new, unknown frontiers for us. As Bion aptly put it, psychoanalysis is expanding in many areas and generating different theoretical possibilities. But, as this process is happening at an extremely rapid pace, it would be useful for the new theories which have arisen from the expansion of the psychoanalytic universe to find the elements that would favour what he has called a ‘lateral c