You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The interrelation between actuality and illusion within the clinical encounter is a subject that has influenced the theory and practice of psychoanalysis since its beginnings, particularly with regard to how clinicians identify and construe the transference.
After he revised his theory in terms of psychic reality and the Oedipus complex, Freud continued to focus theoretical attention away from the pathogenic actuality or event to the illusion, or unconscious fantasy linked to phase-specific unconscious wishes. There is ample evidence of his ongoing clinical concern with the objective event as well as with the subjective meaning to which it gave rise (Freud, 1918; Kardiner, 1977; Levine, 1990). Despite that evidence, after Freud's death the idea that meaning developed from the reciprocal relation between inner and outer event was in practice often ignored in favor of a simplified version of fantasy so that there was more than a kernel of truth in the charge that classical psychoanalysis—as opposed to some classical analysts—did not pay sufficient attention to actual traumatic childhood events and their impact on the individual.
In retrospect, it is curious that a dichotomous relationship between actuality and illusion became so entrenched. There has always been a current in psychoanalytic thinking in which actual events are not only interpreted in terms of an individual's fantasy systems but are simultaneously seen to organize and influence