ABSTRACT
This chapter compares children’s fantasies with psychotic delusions, and thereby shows why the human ego cannot make more extensive use of the mechanism of denying the existence of objective sources of anxiety and unpleasure. An ego which attempts to save itself anxiety and renunciation of instinct and to avoid neurosis by denying reality is overstraining this mechanism. The ego’s capacity for denying reality is wholly inconsistent with another function, greatly prized by it—its capacity to recognize and critically to test the reality of objects. Intellectually children were very well able to distinguish between fantasy and fact. But in the sphere of affect they canceled the objective painful facts and performed a hypercathexis of the fantasy in which these were reversed, so that the pleasure which they derived from imagination triumphed over the objective unpleasure. It is difficult to say when the ego loses the power of surmounting considerable quantities of objective unpleasure by means of fantasy.
