ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore the link between work and reality, or, more precisely, between the individual and a reality suitable to work. As I have indicated at various points in earlier chapters, not all reality is suited to the kind of work that engages the individual's imaginative capacities. Not all reality offers a setting in which doing can express being. Among the different kinds of reality in which we might ®nd ourselves, only one offers that setting. This means that if we are to do the kind of work that expresses being in activity, we must do two things at once: We must bring our selves to work and we must shape the setting for work (reality) in a way suitable to the presence of the self. Because of this, it will not be suf®cient for us to take the terms reality or reality principle for granted. For work of the kind with which we are concerned here, reality is not simply a matter of what is outside ourselves, reality is something that must ®rst be conceived. In the words of Erik Erikson:
Maybe our habitual reference to man's environment as an ``outer world'' attests, more than any other single item, to the fact that the world of that intuitive and active participation which constitutes most of our waking life is still foreign territory to our theory.
