Second Brief Communication: The Resilience of Illusion

Brief Article

Second Brief Communication: TheResilience of Illusion

PHILLIP FREEMAN

In my first communication I discussed stories in which characters renounceillusion because they fear falling down the rabbit hole. Now I will describe somecharacters in fiction and from clinical situations in which individuals, livingwithin fantasy constructions of their own making, refuse reality, including realopportunities for gratification, because they suspect they are being deceived byan illusion. As Freud wrote of neurotics in the Dora case, “If what they long formost intensely in their phantasies is presented to them in reality, they nonethe-less flee from it; and they abandon themselves to their phantasies the most readilywhere they need no longer fear to see them realized” (Freud, 1905[1901]/1958a).

Enrico IV, the lead character from a play of the same name written byPirandello, is participating in a costume drama as a young man when he suffersa head injury and develops a delusional psychosis in which he takes himself tobe the character he portrayed in the ball, the 11th century German Emperor,Enrico IV (Pirandello, 1921). In brief, after many years supporting his delusionby maintaining a throne room and vassals, his family conspires with a psychiatristto shock him out of his madness by replacing the life size puppet of the woman hehad loved at the ball with the real figure of the woman’s now grown daughter andthen forcing him to face the image of the real woman now aged. They hope theshocking evidence that time has passed will wake him from his illusion. Whatthey do not know is that he had spontaneously recovered years before and nowmaintained the fiction because he preferred the relative authenticity of a volun-tarily assumed character to the self-deception of an unrecognized fiction. The planbackfires and drives him mad instead of sane. It appears that the precipitousrealization of his fantasy was so tempting that it overrode his willingness to rejectthe illusion for reality. To have the illusion made real, to have the woman whosestatue he had worshipped and possessed in fantasy for 20 years suddenly comealive, to have the puppet made flesh, the impossible wish realized, in defiance oftime, generation and mortality (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1984), was irresistible.

A second story caught my eye in a recent one day survey of the newspapersfor stories of simulations and the encroachments of the virtual. It was the story

Int. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies (2011)DOI: 10.1002/apsCopyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic StudiesInt. J. Appl. Psychoanal. Studies (2011)Published online in Wiley Online Library(wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/aps.324

of the moe in Japan, a sub-group that numbers in the thousands, of the muchlarger group of otaku (Katayama, 2009). The otaku are devoted to anime andvideo games. The moe are devoted to romantic relationships with body-pillowgirlfriends. They date them, sit them up in restaurants, order them food, socializewith them, and have some form of sex. They are not overtly psychotic. Theyknow the girlfriends are not real but they insist that their feelings are and there-fore the relationship is. One spokesperson argued that the three-dimensional(3D) relationships are corrupted by the marketplace but a “trained imagination”can produce a two-dimensional (2D) relationship that is pure. Still, many moelong for the next dimensional step and Japan’s National Institute of AdvancedIndustrial Science and Technology has already produced a full sized girl robotthat walks, talks, and bats her eyelashes.

Mr A, a patient in analysis, tells a story of being humiliated as a sissy duringhis early life. He managed by constructing a fiction in which he was a powerfulwizard. He performed rituals that forced his imaginary subjects to serve and dohis bidding.

At other moments he managed by pretending to be an adult. He sat with hismother and her friends in coffee klatches. He relied on lying to escape responsi-bilities and avoid feared humiliations. He told his friends an elaborate web ofinvented stories covering his social and sexual activities.

He presents for treatment at a moment in his life as a young minister whenthe collision of his multiple stories becomes so unwieldy that he has lost anysense of who he might be. He emphasizes obsessional doubting and a fear ofcommitment but his panic seems more closely tied to his inability to decipheranything about himself that might be true. His only source of pride is dupingothers and his greatest fear is that, at any moment of sincerity, he has fallenvictim to his own deceptions.

A crisis occurs when he meets a young woman who offers him love. He longsfor the attachment but is terrified that he is about to lose the last thing abouthimself that he believes to be true: his conviction of his own falseness. As withEnrico, the step into reality is too precipitous and he initially backs away.

He knows the lover is real and that he is hiding in his fiction. But he alsobelieves that only his lie is real, and the lover just a character in his story. It isnot that he cannot tell what is true. He is not delusional. He lacks convictionabout what is true. He does not stand by what he knows. For him, the inabilityto distinguish reality from fantasy is more of a character issue (Weinshel, 1979).

The possibility of improving his reality testing is joined to the goal ofenabling him to venture beyond the moat of his fantasy constructions so thathe might be surprised by the rewards, however limited, that the world has tooffer. That the real advanced degree and promotion he grudgingly admits arein the offing, however imperfect, are probably still better than an emperor’sthrone that he can never in fact achieve however many times he may rewindthe tape and try. [It is the moral of Freud’s telling of The Gradiva (Freud,1907/1958b).]

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Another example, drawn from fiction, of a character treating apparently realopportunities for pleasure as a dangerous fantasy, occurs in the work of theauthor, Stephen Donaldson. Donaldson spent his childhood in the companyof his father, a physician who treated lepers in India. As a young man duringthe 1970s, Donaldson wrote a popular series of fantasy books, The Chroniclesof Thomas Covenant, in which the protagonist, a writer, comes down withleprosy (Donaldson, 1977). The illness ravages his body and ruins his life andhis marriage. At the outset of the novels, the protagonist, Thomas Covenant,lives as an outcast outside of a small village. His survival is dependent on hisscrupulous adherence to a routine of visually inspecting his extremities becausehis sensory deficits could result in an unrecognized wound that could progress toinfection, gangrene, amputation and death if not properly attended to. On a tripto the village, Covenant is struck by an automobile. He wakes in a world wherehis sensations, including his potency, are restored and amplified. He is recog-nized by the populace as a figure of great historic importance and power, andhe is immediately assigned a mission on which their survival depends. In themidst of this drama and the exaltation he feels at his restored capacities, he holdsfast to his conviction that he must not believe in any of it or else the disciplinethat has kept him alive will be neglected and the result will be his death.

Mr B, a patient in analysis, grows up under depriving circumstances withoverwhelmed parents such that he must struggle with intense hostility towardsthe same parental figures on whom he otherwise depends. He manages by fillingthe world with his projected aggression which decreases his internal tension atthe cost of living in a terrifying world of his own construction. He is highlytrained but works at the lowest level of his field because encounters with evalua-tors inevitably provoke his suspicions. He briefly connects with women hebelieves will protect him from danger but they inevitably disappoint him andarouse his rage.

He treats every excitement – the Super Bowl, visits from children – as asource of confusion and every overture – birthday greetings from an x-wife,protective warnings from a female boss – as an attack. He cannot imagine goodintentions and so he is like the woman in the German film The Lives of Otherswho cannot imagine help from a Stasi agent and so dies from a lack of imagina-tion (Henckel von Donnersmark, 2006).

Over time, under the protective arm of an idealized transference to hisanalyst, he makes forays into the world. At first he is more anxious but soonthe feared attacks are more represented in dreams where they can be recognizedand observed. He comes to express new dreams in which he travels with hisanalyst in a car searching for a party. But he never stops fearing that he will losehis parking space.

Having considered examples of rejecting reality, now we will consider twosituations where efforts are made to limit, reveal, or deny the illusion: the first,in which the analyst wants to remain in fantasy illusion but the patient wantsto get real, and the second, in which the analyst gets real with the patient.

The resilience of illusion


A simulated psychoanalyst in Second Life – an online virtual world popu-lated by the avatars of approximately two million persons – told me that adilemma he faced in his analytic work with avatars was that they got real withhim. They fell out of character and began discussing the traumas and difficultiesof their actual lives in ways that strained the limits of what he hoped he couldoffer as an avatar psychoanalyst.

In addition to simulated psychoanalysis, the virtual worlds and communitiesoffer a rich playground for illusion but I suspect that the virtual world illusion, likeany simulation, inevitably increases dread, because, as a solution to scarcity –providing a virtual substitute for someone or something lost, or unattainable – itinevitably serves as a reminder of what has been lost but not mourned, gainedbut not achieved.

People who do not participate in these anonymous manufactured communi-ties of endless possibility often respond to news of them with a measure of alarmor even revulsion. Perhaps this reaction occurs in response to the suspicion that,when the illusion is taken as real, what might be evoked by way of play isreplaced by way of simulation, just as, in a perverse regression, the transitionalobject might harden into the fetish, and a suspension of disbelief is replacedby disavowal (Bronstein, 1992).

We have mentioned: Illusions we renounce in response to the anxiety engen-dered by the promise of realized omnipotent fantasy. Illusions we embrace asdefensive protections. Illusions we bolster to enhance the reality of our substitu-tions and simulations. Now let us consider: Illusions we deny. Specifically, thesituation in which an analyst seeks to curtail illusion:

Mr C, a patient in analysis, tells me that his prior psychoanalyst liked to getreal with him. He gave him advice about whom he should marry, where heshould work, and how he should invest his money. It was tricky for the patientto accept the advice because the patient’s father had written his school papersfor him and so, the more real his therapist got with him, the more Mr C fell intoan uncanny feeling that he was reliving the past in the present. He said heappreciated the advice but he felt incapable of knowing what he wanted forhimself. He said he felt helpless, like in a dream. In that treatment, the essentialambiguity of psychoanalytic treatment had been replaced by an unanalyzedenactment (Adler, 1989).

The analyst was trying to free him of a dependent relation to an idealizedauthority not by analyzing the illusion but by enacting a competing illusion –of the no-need-to-be-an-authority renegade liberator. But illusions are resilientand motivated – by a need to repeat instead of remember, by a need to createexternal representatives of magic to protect us – and so an unanalyzed enact-ment took hold in which the analyst acted like the patient’s experience of hisfather and the idealized authority was recreated in the demystifier.

As occurred with those who sought to demystify classical illusionist cinema,the immediate illusion is exposed but replaced by new illusions. This develop-ment is probably inevitable, but in analysis there is the added risk that the

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new unrecognized illusion will be taken for real. It is possible to forget – Freudsaid it was the “unique charge” to the psychoanalyst to remember – our inclina-tions to rekindle infantile omnipotence both in our private illusions and in theconjurers we would conjure to accompany us into the dangerous world (Freud,1915/1958c).

Levi-Strauss recounted a story of a Kwakiutl Indian who sought to expose thetribal shamans (Levi-Strauss, 1963). He managed to receive training from thesehealers as a shaman but his plan to expose them was complicated by the fact thathis patients kept getting better under his care. He was too responsible aresearcher to discount his data so he continued to practice as a much soughtafter shaman while simultaneously seeking to expose shamans that he consid-ered to be frauds. Here we have someone determined to demystify illusion butopen enough to recognize the evidence that illusion persists and contributesto our experience of reality.

We are not to be denied our magic or our magicians. We may portrayourselves as the passive subjects of treatments and trances and illusions but weare also the authors.

When a young Freud went to see the famous French neurologist hypnotizehysterics and get them to perform their paralyses and fits before a packed houseat the Salpetriere, we could say that Charcot mesmerized him – he said he hadnever before been so moved and that Charcot was as close as he had seen ofperfection – but Charcot was not the first of Freud’s conjured mentors (Gay,1988). The hysterics Charcot willed to perform their copulatory fits to anexcited crowd might also be understood to have lent their wills. Does thehypnotist create the hysteric or is it the other way around? Some of the youngwomen were apparently pretending – acting – and sweeping the audience alongin their performance, but an audience also demands its magic (Sidlauskas, 1997).

I have tried to say something about the ubiquity of illusion, from the earliestillusions of infantile omnipotence, to the attempts to hold onto some vestige ofthat power through play, daydreams, creative fictions, and the conjuring ofconjurers – which is to say, the idealization of selected others. When it appearsthat omnipotence might be realized it provokes anxiety – moral fears of trans-gression and rational fears for survival – and may result in illusions of renouncedillusion – as occurred in the films where the action heroes reject the offer ofomnipotence. Recognizing illusion has the potential to enrich experience.The fantasy of eliminating illusion runs the risk of the Illusion of No Illusion.

REFERENCES

Adler, G. (1989). Transitional phenomena, projective identification, and the essential ambiguityof the psychoanalytic situation. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 58, 81–104.

Bronstein, A. A. (1992).The fetish, transitional objects, and illusion. Psychoanalytic Review, 79,239–260.

Chasseguet-Smirgel, J. (1984). Creativity and perversion. New York: WW Norton and Co.

The resilience of illusion


Donaldson, S. (1977). Lord foul’s bane. New York: Ballantine Books.Freud, S. (1958a). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (vol. 7, pp. 1–243). London: Hogarth

Press. (Original work published 1905[1901].)Freud, S. (1958b). Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ (vol. 9, pp. 1–95). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work

published 1907.)Freud S. (1958c). Observations on transference-love (Further recommendations on the technique of

psychoanalysis: II) (vol. 12, pp. 145–156). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work published1915.)

Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. New York: WW Norton and Co.Henckel von Donnersmark F. (2006). The Lives of Others. Sony Pictures Classics.Katayama, L. (2009). Love in 2-D. New York Times, July 21.Levi-Strauss C. (1963). The sorcerer and his magic In Structural Anthropology, Chapter IX. New

York: Basic Books.Pirandello, L. (1921). Henry IV (Enrico Quartto) (trans. G. Pastorino, adapted R. Brustein).

Unpublished.Sidlauskas, S. (1997). Contesting femininity: Vuillard’s family pictures – painter Edouard Vuillard. Art

Bulletin, March, 20.Weinshel, E. M. (1979). Some observations on not telling the truth. Journal of the American

Psychoanalytic Association, 27, 503–531.

Phillip Freeman, MD44 Stony Brae Road,

Newton, MA, 02461, [email protected]

Freeman


Second Brief Communication: The Resilience of Illusion

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