Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

May 31, 1960. PERCEPTION, IMAGINATION, AND REALITY. David Beres, M.D.

This is a further contribution to the author's investigation of the psychoanalytic psychology of imagination, which examines the role of imagination in the interrelationship of perception and reality. The conclusion is reached that far from being opposed to reality, one of the most important functions of imagination is adaptation to reality.

Imagination is defined as 'the capacity to form a mental representation of either an object, an affect, a body function, or an instinctual drive—not actually or immediately present to the senses'. This broadens the concept of imagination to cover all human psychic phenomena in which absent objects achieve mental representation. Dr. Beres conceives of the capacity to form mental representations as a basic process which yields a variety of products. Among these he lists images, symbols, fantasies, dreams, ideas, thoughts, and concepts. In this broad sense imagination can then be subdivided into primary process imagination and secondary process imagination, according to the mode of discharge of instinctual energies as being immediate or delayed, and according to the degree of ego control.

The ego function of relating to reality is based on perceptive experiences. The author formulates a hierarchy of perceptive experiences in which immediate sensation, the reaction of sense organs to sense data, is the first level. The organization of these primary sensations into percepts forms the second level. Only at the third level does perception achieve representations independent of immediate and direct sensory stimulation, a point at which one may speak of a true mental representation of something which is not actually present to the senses. It follows that there are several different aspects of perception which may constitute reality. There is an external reality of which one's own body is a part; there is a reality of direct perception; there is a reality of or