Discussion of Brenner: Reflections on Psychoanalysis—and Parallel Reflections

When Freud (1927), in defense of reason against illusion, opined that while the voice of the intellect is soft it will prevail, he must have been thinking of Charles Brenner. You have read vintage Brenner. No frills or cloaks or shady answers. I was brought to mind of Jack Webb in the long ago Dragnet, who gets to the heart of things: “The facts, Ma'am, just the facts.”

But first a few words about facts and reason. One, facts are not believed, and by many psychoanalysts are thought not to exist. Second, psychoanalysis has changed the meaning of facts. Fantasies, which used to be contrasted with facts, are now a form of facts. Facts have become multifaceted and have acquired another dimension. Thoughts, fantasies, feelings, psychoanalytic facts, are not parts of material reality, but are subsumed under the rubric of psychic reality. The central theme of the International Psychoanalytical Association Congress in San Francisco in 1995, psychic reality, was endowed by psychoanalysis with a life on a par with other realities.

An International Psychoanalytical Association conference at West Point, New York (1994), aimed at defining “clinical facts,” brought out a suspiciousness against events as facts, traumatic or otherwise, often to the point of a distrust of history as valid or useful. Because experience is filtered through the mental apparatus for an individual fashioning of what has come from without, there is belief in narrative rather than historical truth. Anamnestic data, along with the “facts” they purportedly provide, have become subjects of doubt, virtually