ABSTRACT
The view of our internal worlds we began to explore in chapter 6 implies a markedly different "external" world than that of traditional psychoanalysis. In that objectivist perspective, the external world is the real world, accurately perceived by our senses and registered in our minds in object representations. It is a discovered world that exerts its influence from the time children "turn to reality" at about two years of age and begin to take its parameters into account. Along the self-nonself dimension, it is the external world of other people, which we take into account with increasing accuracy in developmental or clinical processes of introjection and projection. Along the mental-physical dimension, it is the world of reality that we come to symbolize in the establishment of our internal worlds. People's experiences of the external world may be distorted by personally motivated wishes, conflicts, and defenses originating in the drives. In the classical perspective, it is a central function of
analysis to remove these drive-based distortions and give people back the true (sense-based) history of their lives.
