ABSTRACT
In an interview with Juliet Mitchell, in the context of speaking of creative artists as well as analysts, Enid Balint said the following: “To perceive something you have not perceived before is terribly difficult; we fight against it like mad” (1993, p. 235). “Like the physical,” Freud wrote in 1915, “the psychical is not necessarily in reality what it appears to us to be. We shall be glad to learn, however, that the correction of internal perception will turn out not to offer such great difficulties as the correction of external perception-that internal objects are less unknowable than the external world” (1915e, p. 171). If this is indeed the case, we may wonder whether it is a cause for consolation or for increased worry.
