The Analytic Stance: Psychic Reality vs.Ordinary Reality

Salvador Dali, Raphaelesque Head Exploding

Ordinary reality does refer to the encounters and events we experience in external reality. But the feelings, hopes and anxieties which comprise our internal experience are also part of our ordinary reality. These too are experiences we have, or which happen to us. By ordinary reality I mean the ensemble of our internal and external realities, as we experience them.

Psychic reality is the realm where we reflect on what happens to us. Our psychic reality is constituted by what we make (consciously and unconsciously) of our experiences, both internal and external. For that to happen, for us to have a psychic reality at all, some kind of representation of our experience is necessary. If we have no way of representing to ourselves what we experience, we cannot process it   […]. 

A large part of psychoanalysis lies in helping the patient create a psychic reality out of ordinary reality, by discovering how to represent this experience to himself so that the psychical transformation of that experience becomes possible (p.62)

"Maintaining an analytic stance” means actively holding on to a particular frame of mind..[…] Keeping oneself attuned to the realm of psychic reality rather than ordinary reality requires a particular sort of effort. There is resistance to overcome. [...] (p.59) A resistance to the pull of ordinary reality so as to stay in the realm of psychic reality. Particularly when patients do not speak from their psychic reality but use ordinary reality defensively, the analyst must work all the harder to hold a position within the psychic reality, knowing that that is where the analytic work is done. (p.61)

[...] With the disappearance of something which belongs to ordinary, sitting-up, conversation-like reality, space is made for something different.[...] The lying down, the frequency and the silence are all examples of how the analytic situation is set up so as to embody the negation of ordinary reality.[..](p.68)

Parsons, M.( 1999) Psychic Reality, Negation, Analytic Setting. In G. Kohon (Ed.) The dead mother: the work of Andre Green (pp. 59-75), London: Routledge