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IN MY OWN particular case a widening understanding of Mrs Klein's concept at present named ‘The Manic Defence’ has coincided with a gradual deepening of my appreciation of inner reality. Three or four years ago I was contrasting ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’, which led my non-psycho-analytic friends to tell me that I was using the word fantasy in a way that was different from the ordinary use of the term. I replied to their objections that the misuse was inevitable; for (as in the psycho-analyst's use of the word anxiety) the invention of a new word would have been less easily justified than the treatment of an already existing word with a splash of paint.
Gradually, however, I find I am using the word fantasy more in its normal sense, and I have come to compare external reality not so much with fantasy as with an inner reality.
In a way this point that I am making is a quibble, since if there be sufficient respect for ‘fantasy’, conscious and unconscious, then a changeover to the use of the term ‘inner reality’ requires no effort. Yet there may be some for whom, as for me, the change in terminology involves a deepening of belief in inner reality.2
The connection between this preliminary and the title of my paper ‘The Manic Defence’ is that it is a part of one's own manic defence to be unable to give full significance to inner reality. There are fluctuations in one's ability to respect inner reality that are related to depressive anxiety in oneself. The effect is that on certain days in one's analytic practice a patient who employs chiefly manic defences will present material which defies interpretation at the time;