Psychic Reality And Clinical Technique

Psychic reality is considered a set of experiences, emotions and unconscious representations, personified as objects, which the ego feels to be internal and real. It is related to, and differentiated from, another reality, called external in relation to the ego, which the latter feels outside itself and inhabited by people as well as institutions, cultural norms, laws, etc. Since psychic reality is the object of psychoanalytic observation, the analyst can only deduce it from what he observes in the session. We usually say that transference reality contains the patient's psychic reality, but this is incomplete.

For the purposes of clinical technique we shall take into account both the psychic reality of the patient and that of the analyst, where each signifies what occurs from a different position. The patient does so from his conflicts, from his anxieties and defences, as well as from the values stemming from his beliefs and convictions, which provide a certain perspective on his own way of dealing with the former. The analyst does so from his availability to greater or more restricted emotional contact, depending on the day, the moment of his life, his age, and his particular mental variability. He also has his own values and preconceived ideas about the cure as well as about other aspects of life as a member of a social milieu, often the same as that of the patient. The analyst is sparsely mentioned and, as a person, for the most part he remains hidden. Although this is a good thing from the patient's point of view because of analytic neutrality, knowing more about the analyst would enable us to understand more about the therapeutic process.

As a rule we quite rightly consider the analyst as one or other of his patient's objects or a part of his ego or superego. This seems to suggest that unconscious meaning moves from inside the patient towards the outside where the analyst is to be found. As this is a description of some