Freudian Internal-External Divide and the Impossibility of Normalcy
The central implication of one of psychoanalysis’ most startling discoveries is that the unconscious is the source analog for psychic investment into reality. This psychic investment is a sine qua non of our sensory experience of reality. No one experiences noumenal reality without some irreducible phantasmic investment. What we see is to some extent a consequence of what we imagine we see. Though fantasy is opposed to reality, it nonetheless provides an underlying support for our sense of reality, the absence of which threatens the dissolution of our sense of meaningfulness of reality. Interestingly, within the meaning of strict psychoanalytic tradition, the “normal” subject maintains an incompatible divide between reality and fantasy and knows how to distinguish one from the other. In Freudian terms this is the external-internal divide according to which what is unreal, merely subjective, is only internal and what is real is apart from the subjective, it is outside (Sigmund Freud,