Mingling and Stretching: Revisiting Arlow's “Fantasy, Memory, and Reality Testing”

Perhaps the first thing to notice when reading Arlow's (1969) classic paper “Fantasy, Memory and Reality Testing” is the lack of subject headings. Arlow does not devote a section to fantasy, a section to memory, and a section to reality testing; and his not doing so proves integral to understanding his approach to these topics. And, even though Arlow did not add the word perception to the other terms in the title of his paper, it is as much a focus of the piece as any of the others—and it doesn't get its own subject heading either. For Arlow does not write about fantasy without also writing about perception, about perception without also writing about memory, or about memory without also writing about reality testing. For Arlow, these terms are very clearly interimplicated and cannot be considered by themselves. The term he uses repeatedly throughout the paper to describe these relations is “mingling” or “intermingling,” such as in his understanding of screen memories “as an exquisite example of the mingling of fantasy with perception and memory” (p. 38).

In revisiting Arlow's classic paper, I draw on a number of psychoanalytic writers from different analytic traditions in order to “stretch” Arlow's ideas, and to see how they agree or diverge from other currents within

the literature. Sometimes, I will admit, the stretching is rather speculative, but I think that doing these sorts of comparisons may ultimately serve to highlight Arlow's own ideas with regard to what fantasy and memory are, and what the individual's relation to reality is dependent on—that is to say, what goes into the constitution of one