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‘Play so that you may be serious’
Anacharsis (c. 600 b.c.) quoted in Aristotle's Nicomachean
Ethics (4th C. b.c.) 10.6, trans. J. A. K.
Thomson.
The term ‘psychic reality’, is used by most analysts ‘colloquially’ to denote subjective experience influenced by unconscious processes (Michels, 1984). Freud's (1895, 1900) original use of the term was more specific and referred to the equivalence of psychic experience provoked by external and internal events. Freud wrote: ‘What characterises neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual reality, and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities’ (1913, p. 159).1 The psychic reality of Freud's formulation originates in a stage of development when children experience an equivalence between the internal and external. I shall call this ‘actual mode’, alongside a representational mode of psychic functioning decoupled from external reality, a ‘pretend mode’.2
Rebecca was a pretty little girl, charming and precocious, even when clearly depressed. When she was almost 5, her mother brought her to the Anna Freud Centre because she had developed a variety of problems, including demanding clingingness, daytime terrors associated with separation, aggressiveness, and fear of death. In her assessment she enacted a daddy doll cuddling a mummy doll, which she concluded by banging the daddy figure's head on the skirting-board, announcing that he was killed, and taking him off the scene. In this way she quickly communicated her murderous fantasy about her absent father. Rebecca's father was a casual partner of the mother, and totally withdrew from her soon after her pregnancy was confirmed. Despite Rebecca's insistent