The Necessity of Shared Illusion in the Creation of “Reality”: Commentary on Paper by Christopher Bonovitz

In a rejoinder to Bonovitz that playfully joins him in a language that puts aside our typical conceptual tools that are still geared toward dualisms, I offer a phenomenological perspective on linking fantasy and reality. I suggest that Bonovitz offers a rich descriptive contribution to our work that, at its best, is a phenomenological description of the different modes of the creation of experience. In explaining his work, however, Bonovitz has developed a mixed discourse, one that shifts between a phenomenological sensibility and one that can slip into relying on our natural logic that differentiates between an isolated subjectivity and the world. Such a perspective underemphasizes the more radical phenomenological stance that in experience we are already engaged, already linked with our patients; that elaborating engagement within the frame of the play allows sufficient distance to begin to look at participation in a way that changes it into something new. Change occurs through the connections of different kinds of participation rather than through linking the separate spheres of fantasy and reality. In the end, however, this mixed discourse works in the sense of providing a compelling and thoughtful heuristic for revitalizing the role of fantasy in our clinical work.