Misunderstanding And Psychic Truths

Freud (1897) raised the question of why the seduction scene seems real to the patient if it has not taken place in material reality. To answer this, he introduced the concept of psychic reality (Freud, 1895, p. 373; 1900, p. 613; 193, pp. 159-61)): unconscious desires (and unconscious phantasies) produce real effects. This concept, while overthrowing the pre-Freudian criteria of objectivity to appraise reality, introduces a solipsistic problem as regards the status that we can attribute to the subject's history and to material reality.1

I shall propose a possible theoretico-clinical way of attempting to overcome this solipsism (Faimberg, 1993b, pp. 159-62).

From my point of view, the psychoanalytical method and the concept of the unconscious are the necessary conditions for the concept of psychic reality to maintain its psychoanalytical relevance. Psychoanalysis and phenomenology both place material reality in parentheses (époché), but what distinguishes them is the concept of the unconscious: the articulation between introspection and psychoanalytical listening merits special study. I shall confine myself here to illustrating what I mean by ‘psychoanalytical decentred listening’ through the following vignette:2

‘My father had no importance in my life. Only my mother counted, with her cold and scornful gaze’, says M in a cold and scornful voice. For her, ‘this’ father (whom I interpret as part of her psychic reality) is reality. She accepts no psychic responsibility3 for ‘this nonexistent father’. Sometimes, in a warmer tone, she uses popular sayings that we discover are favourite expressions of the father. Through my decentred listening I hear ‘where’ her father is speaking at a moment when neither she nor I are expecting it. During this session, M repeats one of these sayings and I interpret: ‘Your father often speaks to us through these sayings. Do you have any intuition about why you believe that he did not exist for yo