ABSTRACT
An example will clarify the matter. The self-fulfilment of a wish is achieved in an act which includes an identification, and includes it as a necessary component. For there is a law which ties the quality of wishing to an underlying presentation, i.e. to an objectifying act, and more precisely to a ‘mere presentation’, and this leads to a complementary law tying a wish-fulfilment to an underlying act, which incorporates this presentation in its identifying grasp. A wishful intention can only find its fulfilling satisfaction in so far as the underlying mere presentation of the thing wished for becomes transformed into the corresponding percept. What we have, however, is not this mere transformation, the mere fact of imagination dissolved in perception: both enter in unity into the character of an act of identifying coincidence. In this synthetic character, we have it constituted that a thing is really and truly
so (i.e. as we had previously merely pictured and wished): this of course does not exclude the possibility that such ‘really being so’ is merely putative, and especially, in most cases, that it is inadequately presented. If a wish is based on a purely signitive presentation, this identification can of course involve the more special coincidence described above, in which meaning is fulfilled by an intuition that fits it. The same could plainly be said of all intentions that, as objectifying acts, are based on presentations, and what applies to fulfilment carries over, mutatis mutandis, to the case of frustration.
