Concept
Psychical reality
Freud's term for what has, in the subject's mental life, the force and consistency of reality, above all unconscious wishes and the fantasies bound up with them. After giving up the seduction theory in 1897 he came to hold that for neurosis it matters little whether a scene was lived or imagined: what counts is psychical reality, not material reality. Das Unbewußte (1915) names its replacement of external reality as a feature of the unconscious system.
- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 2
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1900 The closing pages of Die Traumdeutung speak of psychical reality as a particular form of existence not to be confused with material reality. In the Introductory Lectures (Lecture XXIII) Freud states that in the world of the neuroses psychical reality is the decisive kind.