Reply to Owen Renik

I am very pleased to have been asked to reply to Dr Owen Renik's thoughtful and challenging paper. Dr Renik helpfully brings to our attention an aspect of long-term intensive analytic work that can become self-perpetuating if unthought about, and he suggests a corrective to it through the principle of reality testing. He points to those phases in an analysis when, with the urgency and immediacy of the psychological work accomplished, an analysis can develop into a habitual or ritualistic activity. At these times, unless we are open to the method of reality testing, Dr Renik argues that we are liable to be lulled into a collusive relationship with our patients, in which valuable time and energy are lost in futile exploration of f/phantasy for its own sake, and where the benefits of reality testing and ‘getting real in analysis’ are eschewed. When this happens it is a sign of a profession in trouble, relying for its justification on special pleading based on (i) an over valuation of transference regression; and (ii) a claim for a unique analytic reality, different from ordinary reality and held within a special and separate domain. Both are based on idealization, a false position antithetical to ‘getting real in analysis’. The real situation within the profession is then as lost as the real situation within the analytic relationship.

Dr Renik's argument is illustrated by a very interesting and detailed clinical example of his work with Margaret, who constructed a number of conscious fantasies, or ‘consoling beliefs’, concerning her mother, her father, her friends, and her analyst, as defences against perceiving the reality about her real relationship with each of them. For example, as a way of explaining to herself the lack of a loving and thoughtful mother, Margaret constructed a notion of her as a self-absorbed intellectual who was not able to easily form close attachments. However, in accordance with the consoling belief she had constructed as a defence against the