ABSTRACT
“With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone”. No wonder that the ego takes a perception for real if its reality is vouched for by the mental agency which normally discharges the duty of testing the reality of things. In 1917, Freud had described reality-testing as “among the major institutions of the Ego”, which has the function of orientating the individual in the world by discrimination between what is internal and what is external. The fact that Freud did not view this as pivotal meant that the significance of “reality-testing” as an ego function was not grasped, representing, as it does, the template for an entirely different kind of relationship to reality. The type of reality-testing is a function of the archaic superego that exists a priori in the mind.
