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Psychic reality is the world as we perceive it; and fantasy is the way we give meaning to experience (Friedman, 1995).
A thirty-one-year-old woman is in an analysis with a female analyst. The woman is unemployed and in a session talks about how she got out of bed that day with every intention of looking for a job. After a moment or two she decided to go back to bed. Here we have a wonderful paradigm for viewing psychic reality. There is a wish (I want to get a job today), an inhibition of a goal-directed action, and a substitution of another action—going back to bed. Between the wish and the action/inaction lies psychic reality—the meanings the patient unconsciously ascribes to the world. For this woman looking for a job means that she will either get a job that is “mundane and boring … empty” or one where she will “bite off more than I can chew.” We are not surprised that her experience of the analysis is that it is also useless and empty, but yet she cannot wait to come every day. Sometimes the desire to come feels like it is too much to bear. Over time the analyst understands that this alternation between a sense of deprivation and emptiness on the one hand and feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control on the other may be related to her relationship with a depressed, alcoholic mother and a very exciting but relatively unavailable father. It is a pattern of organizing experience, or giving meaning to the world, where her earliest relationships with significant others have been altered and maintained over the course of a lifetime. The analyst's take of how the