Life Is Not a Dream: the Importance of Being Real

Abstract

This paper explores the value attached to “being real,” how it is used in various contexts, and how this value persists outside the purview of reality testing or other objective criteria. It addresses how we view the form of a dream and other illusions of reality, including fetishes, whose sole value resides in their material reality. With Proust’s description of the experience of tasting a madeleine (compared with the indistinctness of highly charged emotional memories) and a clinical incident as examples, it is possible to assess the important role the search for perceptual identity plays in making the past come to life. Because this search stems from a period of development earlier than the striving for thought identity, it has wrongly attained the status of a poor relative. To counter this, an effort is made to demonstrate its implicit value as a motive underlying repetition. Because in analysis insistence on the reality of an experience is frequently used defensively, analysts run the danger of joining patients in treating external and psychic reality as dichotomous, thereby underestimating the beneficial potential of being real for limiting unconscious omnipotence and thereby restoring from oblivion the past and the wider context of an experience.