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.
PSYCHOANALYTIC INVESTIGATIONS INTO HUMAN EXPERIENCE HAVE REvealed the complex relationship between inner experience and outside reality. The contributions of reality to experience are manifold. They range from the physical characteristics of the body with its strengths and weaknesses, through daily events of child care, family structure, and environmental conditions, to traumatic events such as abuse, accidents, illness, and death. These impacts of reality on experience and behavior captured the focus of attention in psychological research for almost a century. At the same time, psychoanalytic research focused on the other side of the issue—the ways by which inner reality affects experience and shapes outside reality. Many issues are related to this topic, for example, discharge of drives, the yearning for objects, the need for defensive devices for the protection of oneself and others from inner sources of danger.
In trying to address these issues, we are recurrently faced with the problem of the interplay between the perception of reality and fantasy life. The sexual abuse of children may serve as an example of the problem. Clinical experience tells us how difficult it is to untangle components of reality from the components of fantasy in such allegations. What is perceived as an assault from the outside may turn out to be a production of fantasies, motivated by drives at a certain stage in development. Yet, some fantasy products are believed to result from actual confrontations with an abusive person in reality. The difficulty in sorting out reality from fantasy in these cases is evidence of the ambiguity in the formulation of the relationship between the two. These matters have long been at the center of disagreements and debates inside the psychoanalytic school and between this school and other disciplines.