Illusion as a Basic Psychic Principle: Winnicott, Freud, Oedipus, and Trump.

Illusion can be viewed as a creative engagement with the world, and as a central psychic motivation and capacity, rather than as a form of self- deception. Winnicott and other Middle Group writers have understood integrative, imaginative illusion as an essential part of healthy living and psychosocial development. As such, it emerges and presents itself in a variety of ways, in transaction with the realities that support or degrade it. In its absence, varied difficulties in living ensue.

To elaborate and illustrate this conceptualisation, Freud’s notion that the oedipus complex is resolved is reconsidered as a creative misreading of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, one based on the plausible illusion of a civilising psychosocial development that would serve as a protective bastion against his experience of the political chaos and violence of the first decades of twentieth-century European history. Finally, the place of illusion and disillusionment among those most disillusioned by the recent election of Donald Trump in the United States is considered in relation to the recent right-wing populist turn.

Keywords: illusion, Winnicott, play, Oedipus, mourning, Trump, disillusionment, politics, Freud, omnipotence, death instinct

The classical analytic view is that disillusionment is necessary for psychological maturity: illusions, especially those of childhood, must be shed in order to accept and engage with the substance, constraints, and opportunities of reality. This view is evident in various ways in the papers by Alfred Margulies, Britt-Marie Schiller, Jane Tillman, and Adele Tutter in this issue of JAPA. Disillusionment is typically understood as offering substantial developmental and therapeutic potential: it is one of the pathways to independence and identification, and hence toward maturity.

In both development and analysis, disillusionment often involves movement from different kinds of omnipotent or near omnipotent security toward psychological organisations that are more practical, realistic, and ultimately more satisfying. Typically, the experience of disillusionment is similar to that of loss and mourning: grief and disillusionment often have similar affective profiles—disappointment, sadness, grief, and sometimes anger and depression. Unresolved disillusionment may lead to various negative reactions and defenses, including idealisation, bitterness, grievance, destructiveness, and depression (Winnicott 1951).

This perspective is quite useful, both clinically and conceptually. However, I will take a different direction here, and elaborate and apply Winnicott’s theory of illusion as a fundamental psychological dynamic mediating between the inner and outer worlds. I will explore the role of illusion and disillusionment in metapsychology, clinical psychoanalyses, in Freud’s theorising, and in the political environment in the United States today.

Illusion plays an essential and progressive role in establishing engaged and effective contact with the world, and in the robust and lively experience of oneself and one’s objects. The encounter with reality is best understood as an integrative, blended transaction between the actual objects of the external world, especially other people, and subjective experiences, which are themselves blends of our pasts and what is offered in the present. We are always making an imaginative connection with the world around us as we make contact with it, especially other people; both inanimate objects and other people come to have meaning for each individual person as we become engaged with them. This is the place of illusion. Without this, the world may well be lifeless and flat. Grolnick, Barkin, and Muensterberger (1978b) put this succinctly:

Winnicott’s view of illusion is within its healthy, nonpejorative connotation. The successful mix of the representational and perceptual world, and of the self and the object worlds, is the basis of future self-comfort, play, and creative experiencing. The capacity for illusion formation . . . is necessary for gratifying life experience, and represents a healthier, more adaptive solution than delusion, discomfort, and disillusionment [p. 543].

Illusion, then, is as fundamental a psychological dynamic and form as fantasy, defense, projection, adaptation, attachment, and others prominent in the analytic canon, but distinct from them. Illusion carries the energy, as it were, of the mind’s reach into the world, investing it with meaning and affective salience—feeling and engagement in their broader senses. This is not the same as projection, since that process depends on the externalisation of the inner world, especially fantasy, toward the outer; projection is generally unidirectional. Illusion, however, is a more flexible and bidirectional transactional linkage, standing as the third principle of mental functioning. It bridges primary process (Freud 1911) and “the pleasure principle” with the “objective” reality principle and secondary process. This may be most apparent in Winnicott’s theory of the transitional object (1951). Winnicott, however, clarified that the underlying psychic processes that underlie the capacity for transitional space operate throughout development and in most object relations, though in different forms.

“Illusion-ment,” then, is a crucial developmental and ontological process, one that is at least as important as disillusionment, something to be affirmed as well as renounced (see Margulies, this volume): illusion and disillusionment are both crucial to the development of the reality sense (Milner 1952; Phillips 1988; Winnicott 1951). Impairment of this crucial aspect of psychic motivation and maturation may result in problems in living that are often quite serious. The capacity to invest one’s subjectivity and meaning making into others and ideas in the world is at the core of the feeling of being connected and alive, and sustaining a sense of hope and a future that can be different in the face of inevitable losses and changes of course. The vitality of illusion as a psychic capacity is more important than any specific content. (On the feeling of having a future, see Seligman 2016.)

Generally, the progress of disillusionment reflects the quality of illusion. Both are related to the security of the relationships within which the disillusionment unfolds. This is perhaps most obvious in normal developmental shifts, as when an infant realises that she is separate from her parents or the oedipal boy realises that he cannot marry his mother, but it is visible also in political situations, when citizens’ faith in the political economic order is tested by adversity, as I will discuss below.

In clinical practice, significant deficits in “illusion-ment” take a variety of forms. In some situations the patient may demand that the analyst agree that what he imagines in fantasy be regarded as objective, in a psychotic-like state that is not always understood as such. ¹ At other times, deficits in illusion may look like depression, but may reflect a more substantial and pervasive sense of inner flatness, or even deadness or disintegration (as illustrated and elaborated below). As it offers a wholesome and life-sustaining factor throughout the lifespan, illusion entails risks.

Here is an example: this paper was originally presented at a panel in one of the large ballrooms of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ² (itself a palace of illusion: see Koolhaas 1978). A few years earlier, a panel in one of those same rooms considered the Mafia boss Tony Soprano and his psychotherapy with Dr. Jennifer Malfi, in the television series The Sopranos. The psychoanalysts in the room, scientifically minded professionals, discussed the fictional characters’ personalities, the intricacies of their relationship, and Dr. Malfi’s clinical technique, applying the criteria of reason in their usual, professional, reality-based tones. If you had just dropped in from Mars and missed the introduction, you probably would have thought that Tony Soprano and Dr. Malfi actually lived somewhere across the river in New Jersey.

What was going on? “Suspension of disbelief” captures something of the process, but doesn’t account for the enthusiasm and fascination that enlivened the room. Disbelief was negated, but something imaginative was actively added. We might say that the panelists and the audience were animated by shared fantasy, but that wouldn’t be quite right, either; there was none of the unrealistic and idiosyncratic quality that we associate with fantasy: they weren’t just attending to their own primary, internal process or projecting it outward. Having collaborated with the sounds and images on their TVs and now with their colleagues, the audience members both found and created something that wasn’t there before. An array of imaginative, bidirectional, and sociopsychic transactions created these different but interwoven phenomena, the multiplicity of experiences we call The Sopranos.

Something important about the core function of illusion seems hidden in plain sight. It does appear that each of us has our own version of The Sopranos (or whatever other cultural phenomenon). Most of us have not in fact seen all the same episodes, or imagined the characters in the same way, yet we speak as if we’re talking about the same thing. The shared commitment to this state of affairs, even when we know that we are not talking about real people, is one of the rather ordinary “illusions” that sustain everyday society. It is thus akin to children’s play or transitional objects, as well as to the arts, religion, political ideology, and many other cultural matters. In such psychic situations, even in groups, questions about the material reality of the fictional characters, toys, or transitional objects are not asked.

Winnicott (1951) wrote about the transitional object—the prototypical occasion for observing illusion: “Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question ‘Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?’ The important point is that no decision is expected. The question is not to be formulated” (pp. 239–240).

Following Winnicott, we are in a paradoxical area where nonfactual situations are taken as real and meaningful, without a question of psychosis. Winnicott built his theory of the transitional space around this deep epistemology, which is at once both quite extraordinary and quotidian. The transitional phase marks just one stage of the developmental line of illusion, though it may be the most conspicuous: illusion is ubiquitous, often quite active and mature, rather than regressive. It is part of everyday psychic activity, though it becomes more obvious in certain circumstances, as in this “objective” look at the Sopranos panel, and in certain “objective” interpretations of the transference in the psychoanalytic setting.

We become similarly aware of such complexities when friends fall in love with someone we see more prosaically, or when non–sports fans encounter others with a passionate investment in a sports team (Seligman 2010). These instances may include fantasies, but they are not simply a matter of projections eclipsing realities, especially when there is a social consensus about them, as when a couple stays in love for a long time and builds a strong partnership, or millions of fans live and die with their team. Thinking about illusion points toward the infinitely nuanced transactions between what is “in the world” and what is “in our minds,” which have their own dynamics and energy. Illusion is not only to be relinquished; it is also to be maintained and transformed (see, e.g., Phillips 1988; Bertolini et al. 2001; Grolnick, Barkin, and Muensterberger 1978a). Usuelli Kluzer (2001) sums up the matter:

D. W. Winnicott gave the term “illusion” a new connotation and raised it to the rank of a fundamental concept in psychoanalytic theory and practice. . . . Inevitable disappointments, frustrations, absences, shortages and impotence introduce in the subject the awareness of his own limits, of the “reality” of his own contours. But in optimal conditions this awareness does not destroy the capacity for illusion, it does not cause disillusionment in the same way as the capacity for illusion does not in any way obscure the clear and distinct perception of the “reality” of one’s limits. There is clearly something paradoxical in this double perception which does not bring about the destruction of either of the two contradictory states [pp. 49–50].

In Winnicott’s theory, illusion has its roots in the parent-infant relationship. Good parents usually take their babies to be the most important people in the world: they are crazy about them. Within each good-enough family, this feels quite natural, and is not to be questioned. It’s just the way it is. But not everyone shares these specific passions: parents who feel this about their own babies rarely love or admire other infants in the same extraordinary way. And there are some people who find all that idealisation of one’s children a bit odd. Each parent’s investment of passionate affection and enthusiasm in his or her infant is an imaginative act, supporting and enriching the devoted, self-sacrificing care that secures the infant’s physical and psychological well-being, as well as the survival of our species, especially in its current nuclear family form. In addition to Winnicott, Freud (1914) and Kohut (1977) also highlight the centrality of such wholesome idealisation. (Recall Freud’s affirmative, if ironic, reference to “His Majesty, the Baby” [p. 91] in his seminal essay “On Narcissism.”)

To move toward a more clinical-developmental perspective, we can look at the caregivers’ emotional investment from the baby’s point of view. To the outside observer—some would say, “in reality”—the baby is dependent on its caregivers, unable to survive without their unstinting care, protection, and attention. This is one sense of Winnicott’s maxim that “there is no such thing as an infant [without the mother]” (1960, p. 587). But when things are going well, the baby is hardly aware of this vulnerability: with good enough care, she lives comfortably, sleeping when she feels like it, not needing to think about her next meal, warm enough, distressed now and then but finding her cries met quickly enough, unconcerned about falling and other consequences of gravity (unlike tod- dlers and older adults), ³ and with affectionate and protective companions at the ready. This happens considerably more often than not: like about two-thirds of all babies, she is likely to become securely attached. Adequate infant care protects the baby from being anxious about her needs being met or the possibility that her environment might let her down. Following Winnicott’s way of using words, we might say that the parents’ care allows the baby to be carefree.

This offers us a second sense of Winnicott’s aphorism about there being no infant without the mother. Even if, as infant observers like Daniel Stern (1985) have shown, she does have a sense of her own physical distinctiveness and agency, the baby in a good-enough environment is not concerned about being other to her world. This feeling is part of what supports everyday life: the feeling of being where you are, seeing what you see, saying what you say, without having to think too much about it. When things are going well enough, the feeling of being alive depends on the sense of being in contact with the distinctive objects in the world, in infinitely varied forms—touching, moving, speaking, perceiving, looking, listening, and more. All of this goes into the fullness of feeling engaged, especially with other people; engagement with others gives rise to the vitality of individual subjectivity. Conceptualising illusion as a core psychic function points toward what Winnicott called “going-on-being,” and perhaps to Heidegger’s “Dasein,” or “being-in-the world” (1927)—the existential ground from which development and experience proceed (on this see, among others, Husserl 1893–1917; Merleau-Ponty 1945).

The infant’s way of relating, then, is the first stage of Winnicott’s developmental scheme for illusion (see Caldwell and Joyce 2011; Khan 1975; Ogden 1989). Illusion originates in earliest infancy, in the baby and mother’s shared feeling that they are all that matters, such that the infant lives in “an organisation which [is] a slave to the pleasure-principle and [neglects] the reality of the external world” (Freud 1911, p. 220, quoted in Winnicott 1960). (This is part of what Winnicott means to convey in his use of the term omnipotence, which differs in subtle but significant ways from Freud’s and Klein’s.)

This is transformed in transitional phenomena such as play and security blankets; it eventually permeates broader social life: private and shared experiences and identities; interpersonal relations; affectionate childrearing; spectator sports; political behaviour, groupings, identifications, and ideologies; and romantic, erotic, and other forms of passionate love; as well as such crucial cultural institutions as religious beliefs and rituals and the arts (for example, in theater, fiction, and paint- ing, in which we think and talk about the shapes and colors on the stage, page, or canvas as if these representations were actual persons and places). ⁴ The power of the psychoanalytic setting itself rests on this kind of psychic process. The analyst and patient mobilise the most intimate and consequential emotions and concerns, even as their relationship is contingent on a set of professional arrangements and constraints more commonly associated with something considerably less passionate.

Illusion and imagination, then, are at the center of the Winnicottian model of development, psychopathology, and psychoanalytic therapeutic action. Like many of his Middle Group colleagues, Winnicott placed illusion as a primary psychic function, akin to fantasy, sexuality, attachment, adaptation, and the like. In some respects, the Middle Group metapsychology supplants the Kleinian reading of the death instinct with this theory of illusion, imagination, and ordinary creativity, locating them in a set of transactional relations between the mind and its objects, with human objects the most important, but inanimate things included too.

There are both similarities and differences between the Sopranos panel and the mother-infant pair. Thinking about them together shows something about how illusion manifests in different forms and mediums. Illusion knits together our core feeling of living in a world of which we are a part, but which is simultaneously and inextricably other than ourselves. Although ordinary consciousness usually includes a feeling that what we are perceiving is “reality,” Freud proposed, of course, that this “reality principle” is not the only pathway for mental functioning, as there are “deeper” parts of the mind that assimilate actual objects for their own purposes. Freud emphasised instinctual discharge as the driver of this “primary process,” functioning according to the “pleasure principle.”

From the point of view of what is thus considered primary, then, the reality principle must be acquired— either created or discovered; the autonomy and objectivity of the world as given cannot be taken for granted. All of this is most obvious to psychoanalysts, intimately involved as we are with psychosis, borderline states, and transference. Both as a general matter and in each moment, then, the feeling of experiencing the world as having “objective reality” must be sustained in transactions between the radical interiority of the primary process and whatever is “out there,” known in the first place in sensations and perceptions.

In proposing illusion as a core mental function to be viewed affirmatively, Winnicott conceptualised this transaction as a third psychic principle: an imaginative capacity in which the mind and its objects are taken together as part of a unified experiencing subjectivity—part of a single frame of mind, in which “questions” about what is inside vs. outside, subjective vs. objective, will not be asked. This is never an entirely settled matter for any- one, and is often rather unsettled for many. It is the borderline at which the “borderline” patient is stranded (Green 1986).

Psychoanalysis is built around this area of experiencing. The toddler’s use of the transitional object is just the tip of the theoretical iceberg here, as the transition between the radical subjectivity of our perceptions and fantasies and the apparent autonomy and externality of the objects of the world (including, most meaningfully, other people) is always going on. Winnicott put it this way: “It is assumed here that the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.). . . . This intermediate area is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is ‘lost’ in play” (pp. 240–241).

Winnicott, then, is decisive in emphasising that the secure and hopeful sense that there are people and things that are “real” and enduring is itself a kind of mental creation: it is not simply a matter of turning one’s attention to what is “out there.” In theorising the transitional potential space and the move to “object usage,” Winnicott is both adding illusion as a third principle of mental functioning and extending Freud’s original two by elaborating a developmental dimension. In each moment, and as a basic category of experiencing, the feeling of things being real is more complicated than meets the ordinary eye: the sense of reality itself is a creation emerging from the transaction between the mind’s activity and the outside world into which it reaches, as that world imposes itself on it. This process is both bidirectional and integrative, and it is at the center of Winnicott’s psychoanalytic sensibility and psychoanalytic vision: the objects in the world are not simply there in themselves, but become something when they are invested with the energy of the mind. For him, the sense of an “objective reality” depends on objects being both found and created as our minds reach into the world.

Winnicott (1960) takes the “two principles of mental functioning” paper as the point of departure in his seminal essay on “the theory of the parent-infant relationship”; his subtle dialogue with Freud there is as extensive as most any in his work. Much of this essay turns on the infant’s illusion of being the only person who matters, such that the child omnipotently takes the world as existing for her and under her control—although, paradoxically, she does not experience the presence of something external that has become subordinated to that control. As with the transitional object, it’s just the way it is. This requires the environment (the mother) to provide adaptation to the infant that “needs to be almost exact, and unless this is so it is not possible for the infant to begin to develop a capacity to experience a relationship to external reality, or even to form a conception of external reality” (Winnicott 1951, p. 238).

Winnicott had a great deal to say about the subsequent evolution of the illusion-disillusion process. He captured one of its central dimensions in his first presentation of his ideas about transitional objects: “The good- enough mother . . . starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure. . . . If all goes well the infant can actually come to gain from the experience of frustration . . .” (1951, p. 238). For Winnicott, the caregiving environment must support the evolution of this maturational process. This is the developmental course of illusion-disillusion.

The analytic setup both evokes and protects processes of illusion: like the frame of a painted canvas, the analytic “frame” works to mark and contain illusions. ⁵ This is often most conspicuous in regard to transference. Decisions about when and whether to intervene (and especially to confront or interpret) often turn on the calculated introduction—usually implicit— of a more “objective” view of things, again, especially with regard to “objective” realities that have been colored or excluded in the transference, among them interpretations, self-disclosures, and confrontations. Even as they are often framed in terms of the balance of fantasy and reality, such decisions also involve consideration of the potential benefits (and pitfalls) of protecting and enhancing the capacity for illusion as well as for disillusionment. Much more can be said about this: for example, analysts who have emphasised the importance of play in the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis (see, e.g., Winnicott 1971b; Milner 1987) are interested in the potential of that illusory mode as a source of analytic progress. This is reflected even more broadly in the Middle Group conception of the creative potential of transference, rather than as mostly a matter of defensive projection or other kind of displacement (for recent elaborations, see Cooper 2018; Corbett 2017; Seligman 2018). ⁶

Debunking illusion at an inopportune time can be disturbing and sometimes destructive. Recall the upset that follows when a different blanket is substituted for the baby’s special one, or if someone playing house with a child were to remind him that that the little baby at the kitchen table is really just a doll. Imagine if one of the discussants at the Sopranos panel said, “You are suffering from an illusion, and I am here to disillusion you. Why are you talking about a psychotherapy? That’s just the actor Lorraine Bracco on a screen of pixels, you know!” Or if I told my patient who feels crestfallen and frightened by my absence during my vacation that he shouldn’t worry, since really we see one another less than 5 percent of his waking hours and the rest of the week will be just the same as always. I would have been translating the patient’s (hopefully creative) illusion that his life depends on our meetings into a matter of concrete facts about clock time. Rather, his feeling lies somewhere between fantasy and reality.

These are all examples of poorly timed disillusionments, but many such disruptions can be growth-promoting, in psychoanalyses and in other developmental processes. This is well illustrated in several of the papers in this JAPA section on disillusionment and, more broadly, in the ordinary processes of disillusionment, de-idealisation, mourning, and the like that are part of good-enough developmental trajectories. Disillusionment, of course, can be well-timed and progressive. Disrupting illusions perturbs things, for better and for worse.

Environmental actualities have to be close enough to the imaginer’s needs for the vital transaction between illusion and the outside world to be sustained. ⁷ These transactions, which have their own developmental course, usually involve relationships or, more broadly, social environments— familial, institutional, political, economic, ideological, and so on. Environmental failures occurring in infancy are usually the most devastating. Both the analytic literature and the extensive literature on early development implicate early trauma and neglect in anxieties related to survival itself, such as overwhelming fears of annihilation, starvation, and freezing, and disorganising experiences of fragmentation or “fear without solution” (Main and Hesse 1990). (See also, from varying, con- vergent perspectives, Bowlby 1988; Fraiberg 1982; Schore 2003; van der Kolk and Fisler 1994; and Porges 2011; as well as Winnicott’s prescient discussions of “primitive agonies” [1974]).

Some patients may be in the grip of feelings so dysregulated and unbearable that they cannot be experienced, but must be suppressed or dissociated. This sometimes emerges through delusions, mania, addictions, psychic or actual violence, other forms of action, and the like. Some patients demonstrate a kind of concretising lifelessness, and literalise or flatten everything around them. Some are unable to imagine that things could be different in the future or that there may be “alternative realities”—that reality may indeed be different from the ways the patient is experiencing it.

In another form, some cannot sustain a secure enough imaginative world in which they can have a feeling of “realness” without having to turn it into action; this is especially true of fearful experiences. This need to actualise fantasy can take many forms, including desperate calls or texts that both express and obscure real need; episodes of physical or psychic danger; and challenges and more aggressive attacks against the integrity of the analyst or of analysis, all in a variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. Overall, when illusion is thus collapsed, there can be little creativity or hope in the transaction between external reality and the internal world—a breakdown of the wholesome creativity of illusion as a mode of imaginative investment in the world. Here we can see the linkage between the failure of illusion and the borderline states, in which the “border” between reality and fantasy is both dangerous and “defective,” excessively permeable or rigidly blocked.

Disillusionment Following Inadequate Illusionment: Clinical Illustrations

In a paper on “unresponsive objects and the vacuity of the future” (Seligman 2016), I described a patient (I’ll call him Jay here) who came to analysis in his late thirties, deeply disillusioned with his career as an associate at an elite law firm, which he had once idealised as a redeeming arena in which he could find recognition and make his fortune. He was the fourth of five children born in quick succession to a depressed single mother who barely managed to keep things together. When he fell down the stairs in his apartment building as a toddler, no one helped. After managing to crawl up the steps, his knees scraped and arms bruised, he was scolded. His older siblings’ bullying was never acknowledged. When he was abused by a priest, his mother said, “Father Patrick is a good man.” While with this patient, I often pictured a baby whose cries were dismissed or ignored.

There was some halting progress in the treatment, but Jay could not envision a productive analytic relationship, and so could not find much real hope or comfort in our meetings. He couldn’t imagine a future different from the present, or get really involved with the world, not ever having anyone who showed him that “you are here with me being with you.” He had been surviving with a false self in a world of counterfeit objects with a fantasised future; his imagination was not integrated with actual realities. He couldn’t imagine anything that would be more creative, which is also to say, more flexible, inclusive, and portable. (This language is sometimes useful to offer to patients; it is both pragmatic and true to the analytic view of therapeutic action.) It was not so much that he had invested in something that he now needed to mourn, but rather that his disillusionment with his law career left him stranded without any faith in relationships, whether with institutions or with people.

As I grew to understand this, my focus shifted from loss and absence to helping him find a basis for hope and imagination. Some of this involved talking directly about these concerns, but more often it was a matter of shaping a communicative and protective environment and common language. This included long passages where he would talk and I would respond, whether about his cases, his TV shows, his nightmares, his past, or whatever else. The development of a matrix of shared experience was at the center of this helpful analytic process. This included many emotionally intense moments, but also very much involved the rather ordinary matters of our showing up every day, my listening while Jay was talking (and vice versa), and the like. I’d like to think that I made myself available to him as an object of his activity, such that he could slowly develop faith in the possibilities of real contact with another person, such that reality became something he could make use of. Here responsiveness and reciprocity supported the emergence of engaged and hopeful imagination, reaching toward a more lively world.

Analysts may sometimes overlook the extent to which analysands are unable to invest their deadened and frightened (object) worlds with that often quotidian but nonetheless special imagination that brings them to life, bringing their own subjectivity into life in the same move. In the essay “Dreaming, Fantasying and Living,” Winnicott (1971a) describes progress with a patient who did not have “a place from which to become aware” (p. 27n): “Gradually, as this patient begins to become a whole person and begins to lose her rigidly organised dissociations, . . . fantasying is changing into imagination related to dream and reality” (p. 27). In many cases, illusion must be sustained, restored, and (re-)created before we can expect true disillusionment and mourning to proceed.

This kind of difficulty may be more obvious in patients who rely on idealisation, manic defenses, and a false self, or even more pervasive schizoid or autistic organisations. But it also appears in patients with less “primitive” dynamics: even apparently “good obsessional” dynamics sometimes rest on this kind of deficit. Robert, a successful financial advisor, related a flow of painful memories about his alcoholic mother’s erratic switching from affectionate care to persecutory behaviour when she drank. Tearing up when I remarked how isolated, powerless, and confused he must have felt, he said “What do I do about this?” (This pragmatic query reflected Robert’s inability to imagine that he had an internal world that was worthy of interest, despite his own self-confidence and apparent capacity to talk about himself.) When I wondered what he had in mind, he looked at me as if my question made no sense: “that was an excellent analysis. The next step is a plan.” He sought an object with which he could do something, rather than creative interchange.

Robert can’t stay with his intimate relationships; even when he becomes emotionally attached to his girlfriends, he keeps deflecting their bids for emotional contact. He thinks he should “relax his standards”—to allow that there is no woman as perfect as the one he imagines. From my point of view, though, it isn’t just that he needs to mourn the loss of his ideal love, but that he can’t sustain the world of illusion enough to sustain the feeling that an exciting partner on whom he has begun to depend and with whom he gets along can remain special, and to link that feeling with his own needs. At first, this seemed to be a case of ambivalent dependency, hidden aggression, and defensive idealisation. But now he seems to have a more subtly dissociative personality organisation. Robert cannot conceive of a romance—or an analytic relationship—in which something new can be created. He’s like someone who can’t quite get his mind around Lorraine Bracco “being” Dr. Malfi, but his trouble is about something more serious.

Thinking of illusion as a core psychological dynamic offers a perspective on the psychological and intellectual processes involved in creating theories, in psychoanalysis no less than in other fields. Situating Freud’s oedipal theory in its historical context with this in mind can lead to a more nuanced understanding of the origins of his postulate that the oedipal resolution is the central organising moment in human development and culture. I suggest that the notion of oedipal primacy may well have functioned as a useful illusion for its creator and his followers in their historical time, sheltering them from the turbulent and violent events that surrounded them in Central and Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. In Bloodlands, the historian Timothy Snyder (2010) documents the Soviet and Nazi governments’ planned killing of over fifteen million people in the lands between their nations between 1933 and 1945. Other aspects of Freud’s theoretical development might well be approached in the same way, including the conceptualisation of the myth of the primal horde, the death instinct, and the ego as an integrative mediator between the drives and the requirements of reality and the cooperative social world, the last two being developed shortly after World War I. ⁸

Freud was largely critical of the role of illusion in psychic life, notably in his pointed critique of religion as a defense against oedipal anxiet- ies in such outspoken works as The Future of an Illusion (1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1939). He places the oedipal child’s disillusionment with the fantasy of an exclusive erotic relationship with a parent at the very center of his ideas about what constitutes psychic health and social order. From this perspective, we can see some further complexity and variety in the paradoxical potentials of illusion. Beginning with his theory of the repression of the oedipus complex (Freud 1909; see also Masson 1985), Freud (1923) postulated a new “set point” for mental health: a satisfactory (if psychically demanding) resolution of the clash between individual destructiveness and lust, on the one hand, and the civilising prospects of collaboration and restraint, on the other.

Whether “accurate” or not, this view may well have served an additional psychological purpose for him and his followers, of which they may not have been so aware. Even as they may well have been making an essential psychological discovery, their theory/doctrine of oedipal repression and resolution also offered a vision that could put forth and secure their hope that ruthless destruction and greed could be contained by social order. In short: without dismissing the utility or veracity of the entire oedipal concept (which I indeed find profound and clinically valuable), I mean to suggest that the Freudian notion of oedipal primacy offered a refuge from the social-historical traumas that surrounded the Freudian pioneers. (All three of Freud’s sons fought for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the First World War; his grandnephew was killed in that war, and four of his sisters were later killed in concentration camps.)

Freud's Incomplete Reading of Sophocles: Tragedy Without Resolution

This can be further explored by examining two particular aspects of Freud’s reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy. First, as has been highlighted by many (e.g., Butler 2000; Kristeva 2010; Lacan 1959–1960), he ended his analysis of the Oedipus narrative with the first play in the trilogy, Oedipus Rex, neglecting Oedipus at Colonus and, especially, Antigone. ⁹ Second, he transformed a profound and dreadful tragedy of patricide and incest into a forward-moving reorganisation of the primitive conflicts of the infantile mind. Unlike Freud’s oedipus complex, Sophocles’ first play does not end in a progressive resolution, but in Oedipus’s nearly unbearable (if heroic) self-blinding and pitiless exile. Resolution and redemption, such as possible, are afforded only by the pathos and degradation of his death at Colonus. By the third play, Thebes is a corrupt state, engulfed in a civil war in which Oedipus’s sons—who are also his brothers, of course—have been killed, compounding Oedipus’s downfall. Finally, their sister, Antigone—who is, again, Oedipus’s daughter and sister—kills herself after she has failed to secure an honorable burial for her brother Polyneices and has herself been condemned to death.

Rather than telling “the whole story,” then, Freud suspends Sophocles’ psycho-political trilogy, reconstructing the Oedipus story as one in which paternal authority imposes order on the lustful and violent fantasies of the phallic boy, providing the possibility of an internal, intrapsychic framework for social order and justice. Freud thus created not only a new theory/doctrine, but also an imaginative world in which violence and desire could in fact be safely contained while the world around them fell apart in one of the most murderous eras of recorded history. Freud, of course, first proposed this idea early in the evolution of analysis, following his own self-analysis (see the letters to Fliess in Masson 1985) and developed and used it in multiple ways at the center of his theoretical project. He initially emphasised (e.g., in the 1909 case of Little Hans) the repression of the oedipus complex; eventually, in 1923, he proposed the idea that it could be “resolved” as part of his structural model, which presented a more general psychology of adaptation to supplement the original, more irrationalist drive theory. This extended theory of an oedipal resolution was thus part of a post–World War I move toward a psychoanalysis that featured innate motivations toward an integrative, adaptive ego. Although this may well have been a valuable theoretical move, it can also be understood as a reaction to the horrors of that war and the social and economic chaos that followed.

Freud accomplishes all this by re-narrating the events of Oedipus Rex as fantasy. In a brilliant, creative expropriation, he retells Sophocles’ drama as if it were principally driven by intrapsychic phenomena from which the actual world of families and states can be insulated. In rendering this oedipus complex as the central psychosocial formation in his evolving theory, Freud may well have been projectively and self-protectively displacing his attention from the actual destructiveness that surrounded him and his colleagues, into the more imaginary matrix of childhood fantasy. ¹⁰ Freud may have been expressing a kind of suppressed longing—perhaps even nostalgia—for the more benevolent (if far from perfect) social arrangements of the waning Austro-Hungarian Empire in which he had spent the earlier years of his life (or at least an order that he imagined and wished for). ¹¹

Late in his career, as Central Europe collapsed further into fascism and war in the 1930s, he wrote a series of social-historical essays extend- ing the theory of the oedipus complex as a developmental stage into a mythological-anthropological account of the origin of the Social Contract in the murder of the tribal patriarch by the primal horde. These works, including Civilisation and Its Discontents (Freud 1930) and Moses and Monotheism (Freud 1939), emerge as justifications for the liberal order in the face of the mobs and authoritarian governments that dominated his world. (See also Totem and Taboo [Freud 1912–1913]; Freud 1921.) Even as there is a pessimistic tone in these works, as in the immediately post– World War I writing featuring the death instinct and the repetition com- pulsion, the sources of destruction and its restraint remain intrapsychic (Freud 1920). ¹² (For notable exceptions, in which he takes up the social crises more directly, see Freud 1926, 1930.)

Freud’s overlooking the devastating tragedy of Antigone, then, which may indeed be even more agonising than Oedipus Rex, may well reflect a kind of theoretical turning away from the increasingly chaotic and persecutory political developments in Europe. (After all, his friends and family had to all but force him to leave Nazi Austria for London.) While there may be something at least ironic, if not disturbing, in Freud’s obscuring of the political world in his greatest works, one can imagine that this illusion protected his genius enough that he could create and elaborate psychoanalysis. Such dynamic use of illusion may be more common than is often realised. From this point of view, then, Freud’s attribution of developmental and psychological primacy to the oedipus complex is not quite as different from the illusions that form the basis of religion as might be apparent—in form, if not in content, especially when the illusory force of religion serves constructive and ethical purposes. ¹³ Again, this is not to say that Freud was “wrong,” but to illustrate how looking at the dynamics of illusion in our psychoanalytic matrices offers a window onto the complex and multiple functions of imaginative thinking.

Epilogue: Illusion, Disillusionment, and the Trump Presidency

Although I have mentioned that I first presented this paper at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, I did not mention the date: January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. The hotel is located less than a mile from Trump Tower, the President’s New York home and the head- quarters of the Trump Organisation. Many thousands were marching in protest on the streets just outside the hotel, past some of the most expensive real estate in the world. This political climate has continued to lend itself to a discussion of disillusion and illusion, and it would seem improper to overlook this historical moment, one of mind-breaking disillusionment for many who have relied on our political order to stand for minimal standards of morality and competence, however limited and, indeed, illusory.

Ordinary norms of sociopolitical order and civil liberty have been flouted, and the conventions that have held politicians to at least pay lip service to some version of integrity no longer hold. Fidelity to facts, science, and the truth has given way to deceit, greed, and braggadocio at the highest levels of government. Those who use government to enhance their wealth and power feel little obligation to hide their greedy intentions. As Michelle Obama has said, “We’re feeling what not having hope feels like” (Blow 2016). Many of us who are most disillusioned by these events (including most psychoanalysts and readers of this journal, I suspect) are economically, socially, and racially situated so as to be protected from the threats and stresses many of our fellow Americans have struggled with for decades, if not centuries.

Prosperous white Americans have been able to sustain a more congenial view of our country’s politics than have many of our fellow citizens: our own actualities have supported illusions that shield us from the variety of serious economic and power inequities that are a routine part of everyday life for many others. We have managed to organise our relationship with our political environment along more secure lines that anchor our implicit confidence that civil and political order in the United States will shield us and mirror, at least in some basic way, our moral convictions. ¹⁴ These illusions are neither fantasies nor a full and objective appraisal of our national history and political economy, even as they may well fit the facts of our particular situation: economically comfortable Americans who are part of majority ethnic and cultural groups have been able to generalise our environmental circumstances into an illusion that things are really okay here, or at least that they will eventually be. Without settling into the cliché, many of us have managed to find our version of the “American Dream.”

Others, living with different actualities and experiences, have had a different view, such that they are not so disillusioned, even as they see the same developments. At that same January meeting at the Waldorf, an African American analyst reported that his patient, also an African American, asked, “What’s the big deal? Now they know what we’ve been feeling all along!” Another analyst recounted how a Salvadoran colleague who lived through the terror of his country’s death squads responded to the Presidential election by saying, without rancor, “I’ve seen worse.” It does not require a commitment to “political correctness” to accept that the first centuries of American economic development and capital accumulation were substantially enhanced by the enslavement of Africans and the violent expropriation of Native American land.

There are a variety of feelings, identities, and identifications that have their roots in political, economic, and cultural situations. These feelings are powerful, and all too often underestimated if not misunderstood: analysts are sometimes tempted to interpret them as individual matters. Perhaps our recent disillusionment will not only deepen our personal political awareness and convictions, but will also facilitate our empathy with patients whose realities have deprived them of hope, whose cherished investment in a worldview has either not panned out or has not been supported by realities, whether in families, schools, workplaces, the streets, prisons—wherever. Many who voted for Donald Trump preferred to take the risk of blowing it all up because they felt there is so little left for them now.

Post-automation and post-globalisation reality no longer supports the illusion—actual or not—of being included in something worthwhile, fair, and, finally, reliable—psychologically as well as economically. Instead, many who believed in their own version of that American Dream have become bitterly disillusioned, finding rage, envy, and racist projection more comforting than a rational assessment of what might improve their situation. Like Jay’s, their hope has collapsed in the face of neglect, though with a different set of “symptoms.” Failing to heed the radical songwriter Joe Hill’s advice, they are neither mourning nor organising. ¹⁵

In political consciousness, as in childhood, actualities sometimes support illusions, and we can make them real. But sometimes actualities neither allow nor support this. The real tragedy of Oedipus is not precisely that he lived out a fantasy. Although it might be that he should have eventually come to know what he had done and was doing, there is no sign that he could have known when he was doing it—even unconsciously. The immediate source of his doom, and that of his city-state, is that the facts were different from what everyone thought they were. Reality did not, finally, support the illusions that hold individuals, communities, and nations together.

1. In distinguishing between delusions and illusion, Winnicott (1951) wrote: “Should an adult make claims on us for our acceptance of the objectivity of his subjective phenomena we discern or diagnose madness” (p. 241).

2. That panel on disillusionment was one of the last such sessions of the American Psychoanalytic Association at the Waldorf Astoria. These ballrooms, including the Grand Ballroom, where Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians orchestra played for national television every New Year’s Eve, are threatened with destruction to make way for the hotel’s reconstruction.

3. This is reminiscent of Oedipus’s solving the Sphinx’s riddle about the animal that stands on four legs (crawling), then two (upright walking), and finally three (assisted by a cane). The elusive answer is, of course, humans.

4. In discussing his view that symbolism is rooted in the development of illusion, Winnicott (1951) wrote: “For instance, if we consider the wafer of the Blessed Sacrament, which is symbolic of the body of Christ, I think I am right in saying that for the Roman Catholic community it is the body, and for the Protestant community it is a substitute, a reminder, and is essentially not, in fact, actually the body itself. Yet in both cases it is a symbol” (p. 234).

5. See Bleger (1967), Baranger and Baranger (1969), and Civitarese (2010) for a consonant view, largely from a neo-Bionian perspective.

6. Winnicott (1960) begins “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” by saying that “the main point of this paper can perhaps be best brought out through a comparison of the study of infancy with the study of the psycho-analytic transference” (p. 585). He did not much elaborate the implications of this bold declaration there. This practice of leaving key ideas implicit is quite common in his writing. He returned to this theme in Playing and Reality (1971b), in which the core link between play and transference is featured.

7. I lean here on Erikson’s neglected distinction between “Reality” as a psychological experience, and “Actuality” as a matter of objective circumstances (1962).

8. There have been a number of important efforts to situate developments in psychoanalytic theory in their historical context. Freud’s theories have frequently been approached this way (see, e.g., Gay 1988; Weinstein and Platt 1969; Schorske 1961). Jacoby (1975), Harris and Seligman (in press), Kuriloff (2014), and Makari (2008) have discussed the adjustment-oriented ego psychological theories of post–World War II America as a reflection of the concerns of the European emigrés who developed them, who found in those theories psychic protection from the dual trauma of that war and the Holocaust, as well as from the McCarthyite persecutions of the 1950s. My approach here reflects my interest in applying the psychoanalytic conceptualisation of illusion in part to further illustrate that idea.

9. In the first moment of his seminar on “the splendor of Antigone,” Lacan (1959–1960) offered the following observation: “Antigone is a tragedy, and tragedy is in the forefront of our experiences as analysts—something that is confirmed by the references Freud found in Oedipus Rex as well as in other tragedies. . . . And if he himself didn’t expressly discuss Antigone as a tragedy, that doesn’t mean to say it cannot be done. . . . It seems to me to be what it was for Hegel . . . namely, the Sophoclean tragedy that is of special significance” (p. 243).

10. Edward Said (1978, 2004) sees a similar psychosocial-theoretical maneuver in the analytic instinct theory, in which he sees a structure that parallels the Western projection of “primitivity” onto non-European “savages” and other “orientalising” exotic personifications.

11.The reforms of 1867 that gave equal rights to Jews in Austria-Hungary were met with a backlash of anti-Semitism by the turn of the century (Gay 1988). Freud’s witnessing his father’s humiliation at the hands of anti-Semitic thugs has been cited in this context (Breger 2000).

12. I am grateful to Michael Windholz for calling attention to this aspect of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

13. See Rizzuto’s The Birth of the Living God (1979), as well as Milner’s complex development of the aesthetic uses of illusion (1969), for a richer elaboration.

14. I recall the childhood declaration of friends who might respond to others’ telling them to do something with the words, “It’s a free country!”

15. Joe Hill was an early-twentieth-century songwriter and organiser for the anarchist International Workers of the World (the Wobblies), who was famously known for saying, “Don’t mourn, organise!” (Carlson 1983).

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