Fantasy, Memory, and Reality Testing

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Notes

This article is reprinted from The Psychoanalytic Quarterly XXXVIII (1), pages 28-51.

John B. Turner Lecture presented at the New York Academy of Medicine under the auspices of the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Clinic for Training and Research, March 1, 1968.

¹ In another publication written in the same year as the one just quoted, Freud (1925) returns to the subject but this time he states that the cathectic energy innervating the perceptual system originates in the ego. From the context of the two different quotations it would appear that in the former he was concerned with the utilization of the perceptual apparatus in the service of the pleasure-dominated unconscious wishes; in the latter he was concerned with the ego function of judgment achieving mastery over repression and at the same time achieving independence from the rule of the pleasure principle.

² The expression “hierarchy of fantasies” is meant to convey the idea that instinctual derivations operate throughout life in the form of fantasies, usually unconscious. The organization of these fantasies takes shape early in life and persists in this form with only minor variations throughout life. To borrow an analogy from literature, one could say the plot line of the fantasy remains the same although the characters and the situation may vary.