ABSTRACT
The belief that reality is or could be known is mistaken because reality is not something which lends itself to being known. It is impossible to know reality for the same reason that makes it impossible to sing potatoes; they may be grown, or pulled, or eaten, but not sung. Reality has to be “been”: there should be a transitive verb “to be” expressly for use with the term. When, as psycho-analysts, people are concerned with the reality of the personality there is more at stake than an exhortation to “know thyself, accept thyself, be thyself”, because implicit in psycho-analytic procedure is the idea that this exhortation cannot be put into practice without the psycho-analytic experience. The gap between “knowing phenomena” and “being reality” resembles the gap between “Knowing about psycho-analysis” and “Being psycho-analysed”.
