Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality

In this 1913 paper Sándor Ferenczi traces how the child passes from a feeling of omnipotence to the recognition of reality. He describes the sense of reality as developing through a series of stages: an unconditional omnipotence in the womb, then a magical-hallucinatory omnipotence, omnipotence by means of magic gestures, an animistic period, and a period of magic thoughts and magic words, until the sense of reality reaches its height in science. He then applies this scheme to the neuroses, proposing that the wish-content of a neurosis depends on the stage of libido development at which it is fixated, while its mechanism depends on the stage the sense of reality has reached.