Fantasy, art and reality

The implications of passivity are a fundamental constituent of psychoanalysis. One of the risks is to see passivity turn into a form of active control. The analyst better guarantees himself against this risk if he has been able to situate himself in the field of reality (especially the reality of alienation experienced by patients in great difficulty). In order to help him do so, the emergence of an aesthetic experience is a useful model. Indeed, the act of the creative artist is, in Freud's opinion, a Privileged means of reconciling the principles of pleasure and of reality in the dyschrony of their contrary movements (1911). He himself often had recourse to the model of the creation of a work with a universal aesthetic aim, such as the choice of Oedipus subject to adversity. Thus, the place of passivity can be better located on the side of eras and the work of psychoanalysis, or else on the side of action, outside its own field, with respect for the framework remaining the surest, guarantee of our practices which must also be defined in the context of the present time.