ABSTRACT
Analysts generally agree that the primary psychoanalytic task is the understanding of the patient’s psychic reality, rather than his material reality, and that, ultimately,we are interested in the genetic point of view,not the developmental one. Analytically, the past that the patient has internalized, rather than some ‘realistic’ past, is the past that is relevant to his present. For example, a toddler who has just been spoken to sharply by his mother runs to his father and says ‘Mommy pushed me down and bit me.’The discrepancy of fact and report is clear, but the child may internalize his fantasied version rather than the realistic one, since at the moment a feeling of overwhelming injustice done to him is more satisfying to his injured narcissism than an admission of being a bad boy who is too small and helpless to ward off punishment. It is that genetic past – the past as experienced, including the distorting defenses that make experience tolerable even at the expense of some observable truth – that his future analyst will attempt to unravel.
