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The Chairman opened the discussion and each presenter tried to establish some basic points. The first panellist, Eulália Torras de Beà, began with the fact that an analyst only grasps his patient's psychic reality through his own psychic reality. She suggested defining psychic reality as the internal representations of the external world and objects, and, I would add, by implication, the events that have occurred in life. She said this produced two pairs of opposites: the patient's psychic reality as opposed to another's (the analyst's) psychic reality; and psychic reality as contrasted with material (external) reality.
Two clinical examples were presented to show how the task of the analyst consists in taking into account and figuring out the kind of world the patient has inside him. The first case was that of an 11-year-old boy who sometimes appeared to be deluded. The boy spent many sessions drawing and describing a subterranean air-raid shelter—all this activity being aimed at mastering anxieties rooted in a dreadful internal world.
Her second patient was a young manager permanently frightened by the risk of not fulfilling his responsibilities. The material of the sessions was dominated by his fears concerning the possibility of his projects being copied through surveillance equipment, like microphones hidden in his office. At the same time, he was terrified of losing his wife through the revelation of a brief relationship he had had with a woman colleague. Therefore he felt he must take many steps to ensure that he would not ‘be caught and exposed’. In his sessions, he feared his analyst would make him ‘accept his reality, reduce [him] to his real position’.
In both cases, life was described as being unlivable. The analytic work consisted first in exploring and expressing, in the transference-countertransference relationship, the dynamics of the kind of world the patient had inside (atmosphere, weather, colours, relationships … ), so that it could be modified and