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The Chairman introduced the panellists and provided a focus for the afternoon's discussion. She observed that we can only know what we experience consciously. Understanding the unconscious or inner workings of the analyst's mind is much more difficult. The question is whether there can be an objective material reality independent of our experience of that reality. Freud maintained that the important issue was external, objective, material reality, which he contrasted with psychic or inner reality. While Freud believed that psychic reality referred to unconscious drives, Meyers maintained that psychic reality must refer to the inner world of subjective, personally constructed representations and perceptions, both conscious and unconscious, influenced by, but not equivalent to the outer world and inner needs and fantasies.
The concept of psychic reality has often been overlooked (see Arlow, 1985; Michels, 1985). Meyers noted that while this term has been understood in somewhat different ways, the concept of psychic reality is essential for psychoanalytic modes of understanding and is more subtle and complex than it first appears. Subjective experience includes both conscious and unconscious knowledge, self and object representations, identity and fantasy. Initially, within psychoanalysis, focus was on the analysand's own psychic reality. More recently, we have become aware that the analyst, too, works on the basis of his or her own psychic reality. As a result, the study of psychoanalytic process has been enlarged to include both the analysand's psychic reality and that of the analyst as well.
While earlier studies, such as Annie Reich's classic paper (1951) on countertransference, focused on countertransference as a possible source of interference in the analytic process, more recent study (Racker, 1968) has emphasised the ubiquitous and inevitable contributions of countertransference founded on psychic reality as an advantage in fostering the psychoanalytic process. T