STAGES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF REALITY

Abstract

On this issue of the Ukrainian Psychoanalytic Journal, we are publishing a translation into Ukrainian of Sándor Ferenczi’s programmatic article “Stages of the Development of Reality Sensation” (Entwicklungsstufen des Wirklichkeitssinnes). The article discusses the stages of modifying primary processes and thus transforming them into secondary processes, as they take place in the realm of the psyche. In other words, Ferenczi discusses the stages of modifying the pleasure principle and the establishment of the reality principle, or as he calls it, the development of actuality sensation. At the same time, he suggests considering neurotic disorders as a result of regression to stages of the development of actuality sensation (fixation points). Tracing the stages of the establishment of the reality principle, Ferenczi notes two forms of presenting drives and stimuli in the psyche: representation (Vorstellung) and image (Darstellung). Based on this distinction, Ferenczi offers a psychoanalytic explanation of language and speech as burdenless bodily images of the future (desired) state of things – thus justifying the nature of language as gestural. This, in turn, aligns Ferenczi’s perspective on the essence of linguistic phenomena with much later phenomenological concepts of language by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. In Ferenczi and in later phenomenological philosophy, language is viewed as a gesture that shows the desired state of affairs. However, among other things, Ferenczi also offers an explanation of the genesis of the linguistic function, which assumes stages of identifying representation and satisfaction (the phase of magical omnipotence), as well as the formation of a gap between representation and satisfaction (frustration due to disappointment) – a gap from which arises the necessity of language as the representational activity of the psychophysical individual. This translation continues a series of previous translations of classical psychoanalytic texts and is interesting for historians and practitioners of psychoanalysis, as well as researchers attempting to combine psychoanalytic and phenomenological approaches.