Actuality and Illusion in the Transference: A Brief Discussion

Is there—or should there be drawn—a meaningful distinction between actuality and illusion in psychoanalytic theory and practice? At first glance, such a question may seem trivial. Our everyday common sense helps us to distinguish truth from distortion, reality from fantasy. However, as the various contributions to this issue have demonstrated, “truth” and “reality” in psychoanalysis are neither everyday nor common-sensical. The monumental discovery that led Freud to renounce his seduction theory was not the Oedipus complex per se, but rather his recognition of a realm of complex mental functioning in which unconscious fantasies join with historical events as major organizational determinants in the construction of individual experience, a realm he called “psychic reality.”

While enriching the scope and complexity of psychoanalytic theory, Freud's elevation of the concept of psychic reality to a central place in his theory introduced an epistemological dilemma with which current analytic theorists, including many of our contributors, continue to struggle. As noted in our introduction, “the separation of actuality and illusion is not as clearcut and straightforward as had been assumed.” Our once-held supposition that within the analytic relationship, distinctions such as internal and external, subject and object, observer and observed are