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, Negation (1925)). The external is the backdrop against which all our symbolic values and linguistic structures ultimately fail, which is why psychoanalysis also recognizes the impossibility of normalcy. There is always some slippage between normalcy, on the one hand, and psychosis and neurosis, on the other. The identification of the neurotic hints of phantasmic investment into experience facilitates the understanding of their motivation and import.

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