In his book Hallucinations, Oliver Sack leads us on a fascinating and informative journey through different kinds of misapprehensions of reality. Hallucinations are, Sacks tells us, “defined as percepts arising in the absence of any external reality—seeing things or hearing things that are not there” (Sacks 2012). He also refers to William James’ definition from Principles of Psychology which in the same straightforward manner reads: “An hallucination is a strictly sensational form of consciousness, as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there. The object happens to be not there, that is all“ (1890, 116).
It is baffling that such a lack of external object can go unnoticed. Surely, if a Lilliputtian masquerade takes place on my ceiling in defiance of spatial and temporal laws I can tell that it must be a hallucination, but in many cases the hallucinatory part of experience is merged seamlessly with the actual situation that we are faced with. It does in no way look unreal.
Hallucinations possess what James calls “the character of objective reality” (ibid): The parts of experience that arise directly from external reality have the same quality as those parts that are completely made up.
What is it that in ordinary circumstances allows experience to be (sufficiently) constrained by external reality? What is the mental power that can we call a sense of reality?
If we ask the early psychoanalytic thinker Sándor Ferenczi, the sense of reality is a developmental achievement that goes hand in hand with the development of the ego – or, as we might prefer, with the very small child’s budding awareness of being a self-conscious subject living separately and alongside other such subjects in a shared objective world.
Let us have a look at Ferenczi’s four “Stages in the Development of a Sense of Reality” (1952/1994, chap. VIII).
The four stages: towards the distinction between me and object, inner and outer
In the beginning there is the period of unconditional omnipotence which basically means the life of the prenatal baby. Birth brings the baby from a situation of, according to Ferenczi, a complete “absence of irritation” and “wishless tranquillity” into one where light and temperature and noise and space are all suddenly distressing. The prenatal baby had no use for ideas about exteriority for its needs were regulated with complete automatization: “The first wish-impulse of the child, therefore, cannot be any other than to regain this situation” (p. 221).
Birth heralds the period of magical-hallucinatory omnipotence. Birth is a radical change of all the newborn has known. It does of course not think representationally about such things and has no idea that the new situation is permanent. As an organism it will, as it always has, attempt to re-establish the pleasant absence of needs, and based on life so far it has every reason to (implicitly) expect that this will happen – much as I implicitly and non-declaratively expect my arm to move when I intend for it to do so. And just like the newborn begins to breathe for the first time in order to do the work that was before done through the now absent umbilical cord, it also cries out as the innate way of attempting to do the work that was before part of the mother-baby-organism’s automatic regulation.
In other words, the infant aims through its actions towards the reestablishment of the familiar self-sufficiency. When its needs are then met its expectation of such a reestablishment is satisfied, and because it has no inkling of the work that others do for it, it remains for all intents and purposes in a world that – in the prenatal fashion to which is has become accustomed – directly obeys the felt needs of its organism. The birth of the person as separate has so to speak not yet happened.
Presently, the period of omnipotence by the help of magic gestures begins. This is where the infant begins to use automated gestures and sounds in relation to the felt needs. The very early fantasy of self-sufficiency is transformed into the actions of the magician that makes real things happen on the basis of certain spells and gestures. Although the infant must now perform physical work in the world there is not a clear, logical relationship between the work (sounds, movements) and the satisfaction of needs; hence the sense of magical fulfilment.
Next and last comes the period of magical thoughts and magical words, where the child begins to systematically represent needs with specific sounds. This signals a profoundly different world relation in one sense, namely the realization that one can symbolically refer to an object of desire (food, sleep, comfort) and have it given to one. The ability to refer signals the transition to living in an external world shared with others, but with good enough parenting the small child retains the experience of efficaciousness. At this point in the child’s life some of its desires will be blocked by the parents – such as wanting to grasp a burning hot light bulb – and it must begin to cope with frustration not just of not achieving immediate satisfaction of felt needs, but of having satisfaction withheld by others. The independence of others and of things has become manifest for the child.
The sense of an objective reality external to and independent of my inner desires
Of what use is this old account to our question about the sense of reality? Much, I think, but here I will limit myself to summing up a basic point: The beginning awareness of myself as a distinct self-conscious being separate from other such beings is part of the same developmental achievement as the appreciation that worldly things are not part of me, but are exterior and independent.
The passage to such an understanding is precarious and entirely dependent on what Winnicott – another developmentally oriented psychoanalytic thinker – calls good enough parenting (1953). The parent must strike a balance between responsiveness and frustration: too little response to the child’s needs and it will feel futility and despair; too little frustration and it will be delayed in coming to appreciate the actual independence of objects from its mental life.
If we think about the well-known false belief test, or Sally-Anne test, we can see what is meant by the capacity to respond to actual reality on the basis of its independence. For the test, two puppets (Sally and Anne) are presented to a child by an adult. Sally hides a marble in a basket and goes for a walk. Anne then takes the marble and places it in her own basket. The child is then asked where she thinks Sally will look for the marble. Her answer will show whether she has a grasp of the fact that Sally’s mental state is different from her own and from what is really the case (Wimmer 1983; Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith 1985). The ability to understand that one person’s interiority is separate from another’s in a manifest sense (despite our interrelatedness) is a crucial developmental feat and, in Ferenczi’s view, contains both the sense of self and the sense of reality.
Baron-Cohen, Simon, Alan M. Leslie, and Uta Frith. 1985. “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘theory of Mind’?” Cognition 21 (1): 37–46.
Ferenczi, Sándor. 1994. First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis. London: Karnac Books.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan.
Sacks, Oliver. 2012. Hallucinations. 1st American ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Wimmer, H. 1983. “Beliefs about Beliefs: Representation and Constraining Function of Wrong Beliefs in Young Children’s Understanding of Deception.” Cognition 13 (1): 103–28.
Winnicott, D. W. 1953. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis XXXIV (34): 89–97.