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Then he thought No. If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain.
So vast, so limitless in capacity is man's imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream.
The evidence of the senses is also an operation of the mind in which conviction creates the facts.
This presentation examines psychoanalysis from the standpoint of fictionalism. Fictionalism maintains that all aspects of human experience are creations of imagination, that mind-made realities constitute for human beings their sole realms of existence, and that it is only about these realms that anything at all can be known. No other knowable realities exist. Fictionalism is an aesthetic orientation that considers these imaginative constructs artistic renderings that are aesthetically formed and experienced, and that must be comprehended and evaluated aesthetically. Furthermore, it regards these artistic constructs as works of fictions—invented textual realities woven by the perpetual interplay of multitudinous signifiers into ever-changing psychical configurations. From a fictionalist's perspective, “truth” becomes, paradoxically, a manifestation of fiction. The term fiction intends not only to underscore the radical divergence of fictionalism's philosophical perspective from realism's but to
Dr. Geha, a psychoanalyst in private practice, is a member of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, New York City. He is also a Training and Supervising Analyst for the Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (New Jersey).
© 1993 The Analytic Press
emphasize its reinterpretation of the materialities realism posits as also inventions of imagination. Fictionalism does not, however, simply reverse the hierarchy and valuation of the real/fiction dichotomy but modifies the very understanding of this dichotomy's conceptualization and, by reinscribing realism as itself a form of fiction, even diminishes some of the antagonism inherent in this age-old rivalry. Rooted deep in psychoanalytic tradition, realism's role has been complex, inconsistent, contradictory, and often embarrassingly naive. Fictionalism contests the many postulates of realism that psychoanalysis has incorporated so fundamentally into its theory and technique. Focusing primarily on transference, I argue not only that this phenomenon has been misconstrued within a realist framework but that most of the other features of psychoanalysis have been as well because psychoanalysis is basically a fictional enterprise.