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Int. 1. Psycho-Anal. (1996) 77, 217

PLAYING WITH REALITY: I.

THEORY OF MIND AND THE NORMAL
DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHIC REALITY*

PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET, LONDON

The authors of this paper discuss changes in the child's perception of psychic reality
during normal development, highlighting a major shift in the child's understanding of
minds ('theory of mind') at the oedipal stage. They illustrate this transition with
material from the analysis of a 4-year-old girl. They maintain that the very young
child uses two forms of psychic reality, which they have called 'psychic equivalent'
and 'pretend' modes, which differ primarily in the assumed relationship between internal
and external realities. The integration of the dual modes into a singular reflective
mode is normally completed by about the age of 4, with affect leading cognition: the
child first understands that people have different feelings, then that they may have
different thoughts about the same external reality. The authors describe normal
psychological growth and neurotic pathology, in which the integration of these two
modes of functioning has been only partly achieved

INTRODUCTION: Freud's (1895) originalconcept was of 'thought-

THE CONCEPT OF PSYCHIC REALITY
The term psychic reality is used by most
psychoanalysts 'colloquially' to mean subjec-
tive experience influenced by unconscious
processes (Michels, 1984). Thus in the psy-
chic reality of the patient, the analyst of the
transference may be represented alternately
as destructive/cruel and perfect/omnipotent.
reality', which he distinguished from 'exter-
nal reality'. 1 Freud went on to use the con-
cept of psychic reality to explain how neurotic
phenomena provoked by childhood trauma
(seduction) could be indistinguishable from
cases where the supposedly pathogenic events
never took place (Freud, 1900). The events
could be 'real' psychologically, and individu-
als might react to wishful fantasies in the

* This is the first of three papers dealing with
the development of psychic reality, and its failure
in borderline patients. A shortened version of these
papers was presented at the 39th Congress of the
InternationalPsychoanalytical Association in San Fran-
cisco, July 1995. The authors would like to acknow-
ledge their gratitude to colleagues at the Anna Freud
Centre (Anne-Marie Sandler, Tessa Baradon, and Anne
Hurry, who read earlier versions of this paper), to two
anonymous reviewers who offered constructive com-
ments and particularly to David Tuckett, who gave
generously of his expertise and encouragement.
I The import of this distinction was that internal
experience could in certain circumstances be treated
as though it were as real as the external world, and
Freud was particularly interested in how the egojudges
the 'quality' of thought, and the impact on this ego
function of emotional cathexis and language. 'Thus
thought accompanied by a cathexis of the indications
of thought-reality or of the indications of speech is the
highest, securest form of cognitive thought-process'
(p. 374). This paper is concerned with continuing
this investigation into how the individual experi-
ences and evaluates his 'thought-reality' at different
stages of development, and how, all being well, he
comes to exercise the highest form of cognitive pro-
cess, a sort of reality-testing of internal states (Hart-
mann, 1956), in both oneself and others.
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218 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
way that they or others would respond to
actual events. Freud (1913) wrote:
What liebehind the sense of guilt of neurotics are
always psychical realities and never factual ones.
What characterizes neurotics is that they prefer
psychical to factual reality and react just as seri-
ously to thoughts as normal people do to realities
(p. 159).
This sense of equivalence is also suggested
by Laplanche & Pontalis's definition of psy-
chic reality as 'whatever in the subject's
psyche presents a consistency and a resis-
tance comparable to those displayed by ma-
terial reality' (1973, p. 363). Thus for Freud
psychic reality poses a danger when there
is imperfect discrimination ('reality testing',
Brenner, 1955) between stimuli from the outer
world and those that arise as products of
unconscious processes. Although the neu-
rotic adult knows whether experiences origi-
nate internally or externally, he gives more
weight to certain internal experiences than
he does to his knowledge of the outside
world. An obsessional person, for instance,
'knows' that the door is locked, but still
checks several times, because for him the
internal image of an unsecured house has
much more meaning and power than the
external images provided by his senses. Be-
cause the term is now used with a variety
of connotations, we shall designate a specific
term to domination by psychic reality in
Freud's sense, and call this 'psychic equiva-
lence'.
We suggest that the slight ambiguity of
the term psychic reality may have reflected
insufficient use of a developmental perspec-
tive. How do we know our minds? Is psychic
reality directly experienced, as a given, or
are thoughts, beliefs, desires and intentions
(mental states) in large part constructed in
our minds, built up over the early years of
development? If there is a developmental
process underlying the evolution of psychic
reality, what is the nature of it, and how
does the subjective experience of reality of
the child differ from that of the adult? Do
psychoanalytic clinical data shed light on
this evolution? Can we learn from philoso-
phers of mind or observational studies in
developmental psychology about the way
psychic reality evolves?
A MODEL OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHIC
REALITY IN THE CHILD
A number of philosophers of mind assume
that the experience of mental states is in-
trinsic, psychic reality is a 'given' (e.g. Searle,
1983) and awareness of others' mental states
is arrived at by simulation of the mental
states of others (Gordon, 1986, 1992; Gold-
man, 1992). In this paper we propose a
model that places Freud's notion of psychic
reality in a developmental perspective. We
maintain that our understanding of the men-
tal world is not a given, is radically different
in the young child and crucially depends for
its healthy development on interaction with
other people who are sufficiently benign and
reflective (see Cavell, 1991 for a philosophi-
cal demonstration of this basic position).
It has become clear that from the first
months of life, a child is intensely concerned
about the social world (Stem, 1985, 1994;
Trevarthen, 1980). However, it is also evident
that the way in which a child of 3 or 4 years
experiences interpersonal reality (and his role
within it) is qualitatively different from the
way in which an older child or adult expe-
riences it. A critical difference is in the un-
derstanding that children have of the mind,
in their 'theory of mind' (e.g. Mayes &
Cohen, 1992; Baron-Cohen, 1995); the ability
to attribute intentional mental states (goals,
desires and beliefs) to oneself or others, as
an explanation for actions, is not fully de-
veloped until around 4 years of age (Well-
man, 1990). However, most developmental
psychologists believe that precursors of this
capacity (pointing and looking, or checking
back for the caregiver's reaction to strange
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
situations) imply awareness of other people's
minds in the first year of life (Butterworth
et aI., 1991; Klinnert et aI., 1983; see also
Stern, 1985). Gergely and his colleagues (1995)
have even devised ingenious experimental
paradigms that appear to show that babies
of 6-9 months attribute purpose to events.
Soon after the end of the first year children
show, implicitly, a partial awareness of the
difference between internal representations
and reality. Reddy (1991) offers amusing
examples of the one-year-old's awareness of
the appearance/reality distinction from his
observations of children 'mucking about',
and demonstrating in their delight that they
did not really imagine their mother would
allow them to keep the whole bar for them-
selves, or to run away or walk across the
road without holding hands etc.
By the age of 3, many important building
blocks of understanding the nature of psy-
chic reality are in place (Wellman, 1990); for
instance, children can distinguish between
dream images, thoughts and real things, they
start pretend games and easily appreciate
someone else's intention to pretend (e.g. that
daddy is a dog). Nevertheless, the 2- or
3-year-old's awareness of his or her inner
world is markedly different from that of a
child in his fifth year. We wish to propose
that the very small child's sense of psychic
reality has a dual character. The child gen-
erally operates in 'psychic equivalence'
mode, where ideas are not felt to be repre-
sentations, but rather direct replicas of re-
ality, and consequently always true;
however, at other times the child uses a
'pretend' mode, in which ideas are felt to
be representational but their correspondence
with reality is not examined. There is evidence
that an understanding of emotions and de-
sires comes earlier than realisation of the
possibility of different beliefs: affect has a
developmental lead over cognition, and the
child's awareness of different people's
thoughts is probably given a developmental
push from the child's unfolding awareness
of the diversity of human desire.
219
The 'psychic equivalence' mode of
experiencing psychic reality
In dramatic distinction to adults, young
children appear not to regard their own
psychological states as 'intentional' (based
on what they believe, think, wish or desire),
but rather as part of objective or physical
reality. The small child behaves as though
his inner experience is equivalent to and thus
mirrors external reality, and that by exten-
sion others will have the same experiences
as he does. The subjective sense of oneness
between internal and external, we will main-
tain, is a universal phase in the development
of children. Indeed, movement forward from
this phase inevitably gives rise to conflict,
and may therefore be fiercely resisted. How-
ever, within this phase the assumed reality
of internal experience may cause even greater
anxiety; the child feels that fantasies and
information from the outside world have a
powerful, direct and unstoppable impact on
each other. Thus, there is normally a pow-
erful developmental push towards integrating
the modes of experiencing inner and outer
reality, which allows the child to distinguish
much more confidently between his internal
and external experience.
So how does the 3-year-old understand
his mind; what is the nature of his psychic
reality? We think there is now substantial
evidence (this will be presented in more detail
in our next paper) that the very young child
does not yet have the capacity to appreciate
the merely representational nature of ideas
and feelings. Even 3-year-olds view thoughts
and beliefs in themselves and in others as
directly mirroring the real world. When a
3-year-old is given a sponge, painted and
shaped to look like a rock, his answers to
questions about what the object looks like,
and what it is, tend to be identical (Flavell
et aI., 1986). There is an equivalence be-
tween appearance and reality. Older children,
in contrast, know that just because they
think something, it does not mean that it
is real.
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220 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
The 'pretend' mode ofexperiencing
psychic reality
So far, we have only looked at one side
of this story, which may have led readers to
feel that we, together with the developmental
psychologists, are only looking at the less
interesting side of the real child, at cognition
rather than imagination. We maintain that
we need to understand the form and limi-
tations of the child's thinking, partly in order
to understand the great importance of imagi-
nation in his life at this age, and partly in
order to adopt appropriate technique with
young children and with older patients who
continue to show these limitations. Never-
theless, we aim to show that play has a
pivotal role in the development of thinking
as well as emotional experience, and particu-
larly in their integration.
A child can pretend that a chair is a tank,
and yet not expect it to shoot real shells.
When playing, even the young child sees his
mind as representing ideas, desires and other
feelings; and when asked to visualise a non-
existent entity, he readily understands the
phrase: 'make a picture in your head'. Chil-
dren use the metaphor of the head as a
container in which imaginary situations or
objects may be created and examined. How-
ever, it seems to be a feature of this mode
of thinking at this age that there must be
no correspondence between the 'pretend
world' and external reality. Not surprisingly,
the difference between the equivalent and
pretend mode has to be clearly marked, and
the lack of correspondence to actual reality
is frequently exaggerated (F6nagy & Fonagy,
1995). If this is not ensured, it quickly be-
comes clear just how threatening the isomor-
phism of internal and external realities can
become for the child, who has limited aware-
ness of the implications and realistic dangers
of many events.
Two small examples from normal devel-
opment may illustrate the potency of thought
for the small child. A 4-year-old boy was
read a ghost story by his mother. Although
the story was not expected to be particularly
frightening, he was visibly shaken by it. The
mother quickly offered a reassurance: 'Don't
worry, Simon, it didn't really happen'. The
child, clearly feeling misunderstood, pro-
tested in reply: 'But when you read it, it did
really happen to me!' A further example is
provided by the father of a 3-year-old boy,
whose son asked him to find a Batman outfit
on his trip abroad. The father experienced
considerable difficulty, but eventually he
found a fancy dress shop and bought an
expensive costume. Unfortunately, the cos-
tume was so realistic that the boy was fright-
ened when he saw himself in the mirror,
refused to wear it again and went back to
using his mother's skirt as his Batman cloak.
Similarly, the common observation that chil-
dren of 2 or 3 spend much time together
'scene-setting', negotiating the roles and rules
of their pretend games, sometimes leaving
little opportunity for entering into the game
itself, underlines the importance of a clear
division between 'playing' and 'reality' for
children of this age.
When adults think about children playing,
they often think of it using their own, rather
than the child's, perspective on psychic re-
ality. It is easy to assume that because a
child at play can reflect on states of mind
including false beliefs, then they can do this
outside their play. The small child playing
can think about thoughts as thoughts,
because these are clearly and deliberately
stripped of their connection to the real world
of people and even things. It is also easy to
overlook the fact that the child may only
be able to reflect on thoughts and feelings
about real-life events during play if an adult
is there to provide a necessary frame, and
insulate him or her from the compelling
character of external reality. The very young
child's understanding of minds may be de-
velopmentally advanced in play because of
the segregation of this from external reality,
and the avoidance of the sense of encroach-
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
ment that they otherwise experience, between
thought and reality.
The integration ofdual modes ofexperience:
becoming able to mentalise
In the fourth and fifth year, we maintain,
the 'psychic equivalence' and 'pretend' modes
normally become increasingly integrated, and
a reflective, or mentalising, mode of psychic
reality is established (Gopnik, 1993). With
this new way of thinking about his ex-
perience, the child not only shows an un-
derstanding that his own and his object's
behaviour makes sense in terms of mental
states, but also becomes able to recognise
that these states are representations, which
may be fallible and change, because they are
based on but one of a range of possible
perspectives. However, this advance also has
the potential to increase conflict massively,
when fantasies such as oedipal wishes be-
come stable representations that can be set
against external reality.
In order to achieve the integration of
these two modes of experience, to create
fully mentalising psychic reality, the child
needs repeated experience of three things:
his current feelings and thoughts, these men-
tal states represented (thought about) in the
object's mind, and the frame represented by
the adult's normally reality-oriented perspec-
tive. The 'frame' provided by the parent, or
by other children, seems to us an essential
part of this model. The child needs an adult
or older child who will 'play along', so
that the child sees his fantasy or idea rep-
resented in the adult's mind, reintrojects
this and uses it as a representation of his
own thinking.
We would like now to illustrate these
ideas with material from an analysis during
which resistance to this developmental pro-
gress was overcome by a young child, enabling
2 This child was treated by Peter Fonagy. He would like to acknowledge his indebtedness to Rose
Edgcumbe, who supervised the case.
221
her to link her two modes of understanding
psychic reality, and to find a greater inte-
gration of inner and outer.
Fragment from the psychoanalytic treat-
ment of an under-fiver
Rebecca was a pretty little girl, charming
and precocious, even when clearly depressed.
At the age of 4, her mother brought her to
the Anna Freud Centre because over the
past year she had developed a variety of
problems, including recurrent nightmares,
daytime terrors that were often but not al-
ways associated with separation, demanding
clinginess and other indications of her anxi-
ety such as hyperactivity, aggressiveness and
fear of loneliness and death. Her anxiety at
times led her to be destructive, disobedient
and aggressive, and a bit of a bully at school
as well as with her mother. In her assessment
she was willing to talk about her nightmares
and her fear of spiders and snails.
She went on to enact a scene of a daddy
doll cuddling mummy doll, which she con-
cluded by banging the daddy figure's head
on the skirting-board, announcing that he
was killed, and taking him off the scene. In
this way she quickly communicated her mur-
derous fantasy about why her father had
been absent from her life. Rebecca was the
only child of an unmarried young working-
class woman, who gave birth to her at the
age of 18 having already had two termina-
tions. Rebecca's father was a casual partner
of the mother, and apparently totally with-
drew from her soon after her pregnancy was
confirmed. Rebecca's mother was young and
ambitious, impatient to pursue a career. Re-
becca had never met her father although she
had a photograph of him that she frequently
looked at. She had often expressed the wish
to meet him but by the time of the referral
the constant demands had abated. In her
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222 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
interview with the analyst, Rebecca's mother
immediately became tearful when the issue
of her feelings about the father of this child
was raised. She made it clear that she felt
quite unable to address this subject with her
daughter.
Rebecca had been brought up in a com-
plicated environment, partly with her grand-
parents and partly with her mother who
earned a living as a child-minder. The house-
hold included her mother's occasional part-
ners, and other children from her grand-
father's previous marriages. In her fourth
year, her grandfather, a charismatic figure
by all accounts, died. Her mother's bereave-
ment reaction signalled the onset of Re-
becca's symptoms.
There were difficulties in the initial phase
of Rebecca's treatment. She insisted that her
mother should stay in the room, yet she was
clearly inhibited by her presence, her play
subdued and repetitive. She drew stereotyped
figures, each drawing having to be shown
to mother, and her defensive exclusion of
the analyst was clear. The analyst decided
to tackle her anxiety directly, that a relation-
ship with him would exclude her mummy,
which might make mummy become angry
and love her less. Although this allowed her
to let her mother leave the room, her anxiety
had not abated entirely. Being alone with
the analyst made her immensely anxious.
She defended against the anxiety by taking
command of the environment. She would
order the analyst, in an agitated way, to
rearrange the positions of the chairs, her
play table and even his big desk, and then
charge him with the task of controlling the
lights, to help her to 'organise the show'. It
was daylight, so it was clear that the lights
stood for another aspect of the environment
which she needed desperately to bring under
her control. The analyst felt that she was
moving the external furniture, both to make
the unfamiliar territory of the consulting
room as much hers as his, and to prevent
them from moving forward in terms of their
dialogue about her state of mind. He said
that she felt worried she would be moved
around by him, like she moved the furniture
about. But while she moved the furniture,
she didn't have to think about her worries.
Later, he added that it was terribly hard for
her that their time together began and ended
so abruptly, just as the light came on for
such brief moments.
This refocusing on her psychic reality was
helpful. Rebecca's pattern of play then changed.
She started playing with plasticine, her de-
clared intention being to 'make a plasticine
world'. The analyst's role was to 'make the
plasticine soft', while she moulded the fig-
ures. This was the first time that Rebecca
played co-operatively in the analysis. She
symbolically conveyed her need for the ana-
lyst to make pliable the harsh and fixed
ideas in her mind, which she was not able
to manipulate. She confirmed the analyst's
feeling about the role she put him into by
claiming that she had made a 'plasticine
world blanket', which would cover everyone
and everything, and she placed all the figures
in her toy box under the flat piece of plas-
ticine she made. The task was difficult; even
though she flattened a sizeable piece of plas-
ticine, it could not cover all the figures
properly. Despite her careful positioning,
some were 'left out in the cold'. Noticing
her anxiety about this, the analyst com-
mented that he thought it might be troubling
her that someone might be shut out of their
little world. She confirmed that the source
of her anxiety might have, at least in part,
been the exclusiveness of his relationship
with her, by rolling up the 'world blanket'
so that there was room for only two of the
figures under it, all the others were put back
into the box with great care. The analyst
noticed that the last to be tentatively picked
up were the mummy and granny dolls. The
analyst said 'Many children are frightened
about coming up here and leaving their
mummy downstairs. Sometimes they are
frightened about what might happen to their
mummies, and sometimes about what might
happen to them'.
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
She then went on to play with the plas-
ticine on her own, rolling a piece into the
shape of a snake, and placing it round a
doll's head, like a crown. She commented
that all the other figures were frightened of
the little girl doll, because she had the big
snake. The analyst said that the big snake
was like the worries inside her head, which
were scaring her when her mother wasn't
there to protect her, now but also at night.
She looked up at him and smiled slightly
for the first time, and said that the people
were only pretending to be frightened of the
snake. The analyst said that he was sure
that people often told her that she should
not feel frightened because there was nothing
there really to be afraid of, but the two of
them knew that her worries felt terribly real.
She said 'You mean, like the pirates?' He
said: 'Perhaps when you can't see Mummy,
you are frightened that she might be taken
away by pirates?' To his surprise, she said
'She is'. Only subsequently did the analyst
understand that in her nightmares and day-
time terrors, her mother or her grandmother
were abducted by pirates. His acceptance of
the reality of her anxieties and other emo-
tions was critical in freeing her mind from
the grip of the worry-snakes.
At this time she began to play more
complex games and her oedipal anxieties,
distorted by the circumstances of her child-
hood, came to the fore. She played royal
families; the king and queen doll had a
daughter. The daughter doll was abandoned
when the king and queen dolls cuddled, but
later she was inserted between the king and
queen doll. The sexualisation of this theme
was made more explicit by the whole scene
being transferred to the couch and everyone
jumping about until the daughter doll fell
off. Then there was a street fire that filled
the house with smoke, and burned down the
whole street. The analyst said: 'I know some
3 Pretend Rebecca was an imaginary friend. She
shared the patient's first name but was definitely
not identical with the narrator (the patient or real
223
little girls who are very frightened of being
so excited, because their thoughts make them
feel hot and muddled and then everything
goes wrong'. She said: 'I think I am one of
those girls'.
Much of Rebecca's treatment consisted of
a single game, with apparently infinite vari-
ations. In the game, she is a somewhat older
girl, Hannah, who has a father, which was
the analyst's role. Hannah and her father
(Peter) had many adventures, most of which
involved visiting Hannah's friend, pretend
Rebecca.' who lived in the same house as
real Rebecca, but who (in the game) had a
father, Jeff, as well as a mother. Jeff was a
pathetic, incompetent figure who frequently
got things wrong, and on such occasions
would often be unceremoniously dismissed
mostly by mother and sometimes by her.
Hannah would sensitivelyintercede with pre-
tend Rebecca and Rebecca's mother on Jeffs
behalf: 'You don't understand him!' she be-
rated pretend Rebecca on one occasion, 'He
is only upset because you told him off for
making a mess'. The analyst, as Hannah's
father, was encouraged to do the same: 'Let's
pretend that Rebecca does not understand.
You pretend to tell her (pretend Rebecca)
that she is not being nice to him'. The analyst
said she (Rebecca) perhaps did not want to
understand because it was frightening to
think that her anger could be so powerful
that it could send a big man like Jeff away
and she was very frightened of feeling angry.
Rebecca's rage with her mother for not
providing her with a father also surfaced
quickly in these interchanges, as did her
shame and frustration about failing to hold
on to him herself. For instance, on one
occasion, Hannah berated her mother for
not looking after the family dog, which then
went missing and Hannah's daddy had to
go out to find it, and therefore could not
be there to play with Hannah. Rebecca,
Rebecca). Both patient and analyst talked to her,
and the patient, mostly as Hannah, spoke for her.
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224 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
playing Hannah, got quite angry and flushed,
remonstrated with the chair where the imagi-
nary mother was sitting: 'It's all your fault
that Daddy isn't in!' The analyst reflected
that Hannah was very, very upset, and that
perhaps she felt that Hannah's mother had
let the dog go deliberately. Hannah con-
firmed the analyst's suspicion and, still in
role, added: 'She didn't want us to be playing
making breakfast'. Later on in the game, it
turned out that Hannah had lost the dog
herself, but was embarrassed to admit it.
The analyst was able to address Hannah's
anger from a slightly different viewpoint:
'Perhaps Hannah got so angry with her mum
because she felt ashamed of losing the dog,
and spoiling the chance to play with Daddy'.
Rebecca agreed that she probably must have
done.
Gradually, the terrifying fantasy that her
father had died in an overwhelmingly excit-
ing sexual union with her mother was en-
acted and the analyst was able to interpret
her terror, that he (as Jeff) might run away
because he was so frightened of both her
and her mother's violent rage and voracious,
man-consuming sexual appetites. All this is
par for the analytic course and clearly illus-
trates aspects of this child's psychic reality.
Here, we want to focus on a specific feature
of the work with her: the importance of the
subtle distinctions between pretence and
reality in Rebecca's games and what was
learned about the nature of her problems
through playing with reality.
A recurrent theme was the confusion of
identities. When Hannah stayed at Rebecca's
overnight, her father came to find her in
Rebecca's bedroom but, unknown to him,
Hannah and Rebecca had changed places in
the bunk beds. Looking for Hannah, and
finding Rebecca, he would be surprised. De-
pending on the context, there was much to
interpret in this game. On one occasion,
when both Hannah and pretend Rebecca
seemed particularly excited about who Han-
nah's father was going to find, the analyst
could point to both Hannah's and pretend
Rebecca's wish to be found, as father's spe-
cial person. The oedipal wish to be found
by the father, defensively displaced to a
pretend child, was self-evident. However, this
scenario occurred so often that clearly there
were many other determinants: the transfer-
ence gratification of externalising her confu-
sion on to the adult analyst, representing
in the transference the muddled character
of her internal world with its confusions of
identities; the split in her self- and object-
representations between an idealised Han-
nah, who had control over her father, and
the impoverished Rebecca struggling to
maintain her self-esteem with her delinquent,
uncaring paternal figure. No single interpre-
tation seemed crucially important, and the
game continued; the scenario offered by Re-
becca, marked by the experience of surprise,
seemed above all to create a rich opportunity
to speculate about what everybody in the
story was thinking. For example, pretend
Rebecca's father would be quizzed inces-
santly by pretend Rebecca 'What did you
think when you found Hannah? Did you
think I had gone?' At other times when Jeff
could not be found, patient and analyst
would spend considerable time trying to
work out why he was not there, and what
pretend Rebecca thought about it.
Trickiest to tackle was the narrator's (Re-
becca's) experience that, during the games,
she, as Hannah or the pretend Rebecca, ex-
perienced the analyst as her actual father,
in all the roles he was assigned. There was
no instance when Hannah or pretend Re-
becca addressed the analyst in any way other
than as Daddy. When the analyst spoke as
an analyst, Rebecca immediately switched
out of the game. When Rebecca needed slight
limit-setting, to be dissuaded from leaning
too far when looking out of the window,
unless the analyst intervened as the pretend
father the Hannah game would come to an
abrupt halt. The analyst noticed in the
countertransference how hard it felt to ad-
dress his actual role vis-a-vis real Rebecca,
as narrator. It felt impossible to make any
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
observation as to why Rebecca might be
playing this game. There seemed to be no
room for interpretation in this domain, be-
cause Rebecca and her analyst were dealing
with her experience of an actuality. The
transference for Rebecca, and probably for
all children at her stage of development, was
at the moment she felt it not a fantasy, but
a: subjective experience as real as that of a
physical object.
On one occasion, when Jeff had disap-
peared, Rebecca was almost in tears. The
analyst said 'It is terribly hard for little girls
who have never had a father at home to
think about fathers who might suddenly dis-
appear, without a clue as to where they
might be'. He was thus addressing the nar-
rator's, rather than pretend Rebecca's, sad-
ness that her father had gone. Here, Rebecca
immediately stopped the game. The next
session, Rebecca cheerfully announced that
she had met her father, and described him
as tall, bearded and bald. The analyst said
that yesterday he had muddled and somehow
spoiled there being a real father, but Rebecca
knew how important it was for them to have
him here, and she was helping by bringing
another picture of him. For the first time,
she cried and eventually said 'You look just
like a daddy, but I know you are my thera-
pist'. In this way Rebecca made her analyst
recognise the sadness involved in giving up
the momentary illusion of the equivalence
of thought and reality.
Very gradually the analyst interpreted
what was evident from the first time they
played this game, Rebecca's unbearable dis-
appointment at realising that her wish for
her grandfather or the analyst to be her real
father did not make it true. In the role plays,
she could explore her confusion about why
her father refused to acknowledge paternity,
and why her mother, who clearly felt guilty
and frustrated, could not discuss the matter
with her, and how real it felt to her that if
she demanded to see her father, her mother
would send her away in anger, as she had
the father.
225
The following vignette illustrates some as-
pects of the change in the nature of the
material. One session, Rebecca was excited
about going to see the musical Oliver. She
claimed she was only going for the songs,
because they were funny, then added 'Oliver
was lost, very sad you know', and nodded
emphatically. The analyst said that he sup-
posed Rebecca wanted to concentrate on the
funny parts, because she, like Oliver, so often
felt lost and alone. Rebecca then asked 'Do
you know that babies are very sad without
daddies?' She then asked the analyst to play
the giraffe game, with a shadow puppet
daddy giraffe and a baby giraffe. The daddy
giraffe was expected to teach baby giraffe
about jumping, walking and eating from
trees. Although the phallic narcissistic as-
pects of this game were evident, the analyst
took her enjoyment of it up in the context
of it making her feel better that the giraffe
baby had such a clever giraffe daddy, be-
cause she was so sad that she did not have
a real daddy to teach her, and the analyst
was not really a proper daddy to her either.
She turned to face the analyst and, looking
at him in a somewhat schoolmarmish way,
she said 'You are just a shadow daddy'.
DISCUSSION
Two principal propositions seem to us to
be shared by most psychoanalytic formula-
tions of therapeutic action (e.g. Abrams 1987,
1990), namely, that pathology is associated
with the persistence of developmentally
primitive mental structures, and that psycho-
analysis exerts its mutative influence through
a process of reorganisation and integration
of repudiated unconscious mental structures
with developmentally higher-order conscious
ones. To take one example, Rebecca's fan-
tasy about the mother having driven away
or killed the father, wherein the mother is
seen as a terrifying monster, was a primitive
idea amplified by the projection of Rebecca's
own considerable aggression. Rebecca had
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226 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
got stuck with this developmentally primi-
tive, unconscious picture, unmodulated by
higher-level thinking. Her analysis helped her
to reintegrate the repudiated and threatening
phantasies rooted in her father's absence
from her life, amplified by oedipal and more
regressive omnipotent phantasies, structured
to protect her injured narcissism. From a
modem Kleinian perspective (Spillius, 1994),
one might add that the projective identifi-
cation of Rebecca's terrifying envy and rage
with the mother (characteristic of the para-
noid-schizoid mode of thought), together
with her total dependence on her single and
rather unpredictable parent, led to a persist-
ent split in her representation of objects and
in her own immature ego. Thus, although
in many ways functioning well, Rebecca was
prevented from holding on to a more inte-
grated view of the mother characteristic of
the experience of objects in the depressive
position (Klein, 1935, 1940).
These ways of thinking about Rebecca's
difficulties are helpful in understanding as-
pects of the analytic material. However, it
is clear that in most traditional psychoana-
lytic accounts, metaphors referring to de-
velopmental arrest or changes in psychic
structures as accounts of pathology and
therapeutic action tum out, upon closer scru-
tiny, to be relatively empty and circular given
the lack of specificity about the ways in
which the young child's inner experience
differs from that of an older one, and how
the former places the child at risk of dis-
turbance and the latter may come to the
rescue in the context of the psychoanalytic
encounter.
Play and the self
What does our model of two forms of
experience of psychic reality, outlined earlier,
have to say about Rebecca's difficulties and
their treatment? Rebecca's behaviour was
fully symbolic; she initiated pretend play with
her analyst and readily accepted her analyst's
intention to establish the psychoanalytic
situation as a place in which pretend play
was welcome. She could label and talk about
her feelings, dreams, fantasies, and distin-
guish these from physical reality. She was
spontaneous, and rarely resorted to cliches,
which might have raised doubts about her
genuine awareness of her inner world. Nev-
ertheless, her mentalising capacity was in
some important respects flawed, and cer-
tain changes that took place in the course
of therapy resembled those we have de-
scribed as belonging to the development of
awareness of psychic reality of the child
between 3 and 5.
When Rebecca was faced with the recog-
nition that her analyst was both a therapist
and someone who looked like a daddy, she
retreated from the kind of integration of
appearance and reality that her experience
of the transference required, Rebecca could
pretend her analyst was 'pretend Rebecca's'
father, and know' it was not real. What real
Rebecca whilst plaging did not know was
that she was playing with an analyst who
only felt like a father. For her, the analyst
looking and acting like a father was, for that
moment, him being her father. To question
this spoiled the game and led to a devastating
sense of loss. This happened through the
developmental analogue of the preference
for psychic reality over factual reality de-
scribed by Freud (1913) as characteristic of
neurotics.
Rebecca was developmentally ready to see
the distinction, and could use it in circum-
stances that were less emotionally salient,
but she was prevented from fully experienc-
ing it in this context by her intense desire
for a real father, for the actualisation of the
father figure in the transference. This can,
of course, be equally true for many patients
at certain times in their analysis, but Re-
becca's analysis was, at least initially, com-
pletely dominated by the mode of psychic
equivalence, where there was no 'potential
space' (Winnicott, 1971) in which the nar-
rator's experience of the analyst as a father
could be looked at and understood. Only
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
by playing with reality, permitting Rebecca
to observe the analyst's mental represen-
tation of her playing, was she able to develop
a tentatively held image of her own desires
for a father, to see these as wishes, part of
phantasy rather than the outside world; the
wishes could then be brought into Rebecca's
thinking about external reality.
We suggest that Rebecca could not afford
to 'play' that she had a father because of
her mother's catastrophic reaction to this
phantasy. The reflection of Rebecca's own
sadness about her absent father was too real.
This may have been the principal reason for
Rebecca's initial inability to play that she
had a father, and for the compulsive quality
of this play when it became possible. Nor-
mally the young child tends to adopt a
defensive strategy of dealing with unaccept-
able ideas in the realm of pretence and
phantasy, where they can be played with,
all connections to actuality removed. Perhaps
this is a way in which play can be said to
have a vital role in the development of
mastery (Freud, 1920), the reworking of a
passive experience into an active one (Druc-
ker, 1975). In 'pretend' mode ideas cannot
threaten, because they have lost their equiva-
lence to what is real. However, Rebecca's
attempt to decouple phantasy from reality,
inner from outer, may have been undermined
not just by the intensity of her desires, and
her unwillingness to give up the idea of their
actuality, but also by her mother's inability
to take Rebecca's ideas and feelings into her
subjective reality.
Her mother could not tolerate a genuine
awareness of Rebecca's frustration and un-
happiness because she herself also tended to
be stuck (in this area) in a mode of psychic
equivalence. The phantasy father, Rebecca's
exploration of the idea of a father, was too
real and intolerable for her mother. The idea
could not be played with or genuinely en-
tertained as a wish. Rebecca arrived at the
analytic situation troubled by the 'realness'
of her psychic reality; her normal develop-
mental progression was arrested because the
227
intensity of her feelings forced an idea from
the pretend but unreal world of fantasy into
the part of her mind where mental contents
corresponded to physical realities. In these
circumstances, we suggest, the pretend mode
may be given up by the child in relation to
a particular idea, which is then forced into
the mode of psychic equivalence; it becomes
as 'real' for the child as it threatened to be
for the mother.
The young child, attempting to make the
developmental step between a dual and an
integrated mode of psychic reality, is in a
highly vulnerable state. The integration of
the pretend mode (in which the child splits
thought and feeling from ordinary reality)
and the mode of psychic equivalence (where
there is an equation of internal and external
reality) confronts the child with particular
difficulties when a thought, felt to become
real, signals danger. While the worlds of
pretend and reality are separate, the child's
psychic reality can include fantasy repre-
sentations that would be highly conflictual
if their truth or falsity were to be examined
in conjunction with the world outside. The
fantasy of the sexual possession of the parent
of the opposite sex is safe as long as it is
held in the pretend mode of psychic reality
where concerns with possibility or impossi-
bility or relation to physical reality are ab-
sent. Pretend desire, even if conscious, need
arouse no conflict. Only when the mode of
pretence comes gradually to be integrated
with the experience of psychic reality cor-
responding to external reality, where the
thought suddenly becomes for real, do ter-
rifying conflicts arise. This is partly because
feelings are felt to be enormously powerful
because so real, and partly through an in-
creasingly clear awareness of the mental state
of the other, observing the child's desire.
This other, as we know, does not simply
have the characteristics of the actual external
parent, but has many features introduced or
distorted by phantasy. Resolution of this
dilemma normally arises through the radical
restriction of such dangerous fantasies first
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228 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
to a pretend mode, and later to an uncon-
scious mode of thought, through the estab-
lishment of the repression barrier.
Internal and external circumstances can
conspire to make such a progression difficult,
as was the case for Rebecca. Before the two
modes of functioning are fully integrated,
representations from the pretend mode may
become so intensively and actively stimulated
that they encroach upon the child's mental
world in its mode of psychic equivalence.
The absence and unknowability of Rebecca's
father may have been such a circumstance.
Her belief that her charismatic grandfather
was her father had acquired the qualities of a
fact, making his death a trauma of far greater
intensity than it might otherwise have been.
The penetration of the psychic barrier be-
tween real and pretend experience, the feeling
of actualisation that comes to characterise
worrying thoughts, the difficulty in discrimi-
nating between possibility and certainty, all
serve to magnify the small child's anxiety.
The acknowledgement of the reality of these
experiencesfor the child is the only therapeutic
starting-point and a major source of reassur-
ance as he or she begins the move towards
integration on a level of mentalisation.
Rebecca, having no 'other' to pretend and
reflect with, was, in a sense, obliged to keep
an idea in her mind (the image of her father)
that was felt to be real. She would have
found some comfort in the solution that
'believing is having'; the hurt and shame of
being fatherless could not be tolerated, and
was avoided by retaining a part of her think-
ing where there was felt to be an equivalence
of subjective experience and physical reality.
However, in the process, subjective experi-
ence is projected on to and distorts actual
reality, which then in turn becomes a source
of sometimes terrifying anxiety.
The role of the adult
Rebecca's metaphor of the snake, which
placed her worries outside herself, was a
characteristic example of the thought as a
concrete physical object. She needed the
adult to soften her ideas, like the plasticine,
so that she could herself shape them and
create a psychic world which was no longer
either pure fantasy nor hard reality, but
which could cover her entire range of expe-
riences, just as she wished the 'world blanket'
to cover all the objects in her internal world.
Many might see the image of the snake as
a phallic, dangerous, but highly prized pos-
session, perhaps representing the parental
penis, the analysis or the devoted attention
of a male adult. The 'world blanket' may also
have been a protection against anxiety that
increased as her sexual wishes became more
transparent. These views of the material are
quite compatible with the perspective we
offer, in that we suggest that the reason the
sexual wishes were so worrying was that they
were often experienced in the mode of psy-
chic equivalence. They felt too real to be
fantasies. It needed the analyst to recognise
that they could be in play, and yet feel real.
As always, then, there was a price to pay
for the comfort of keeping the idea of her
father alive, so that it could only be short-
lived. Her unconscious phantasies of sexual
destructiveness and annihilation came with
this idea, entering into the real world of
psychic equivalence, making them even more
real and terrifying. All children have such
phantasies, but normally the ideas may be
'metabolised' (Bion, 1962) through play, li-
censed and supported by the parents, and
without consequence. A father sits down
during a mock battle, only to be told 'You
are the monster-you have to stand up so
that I can kill you!' If the father dutifully
stands up, he is helping his child to meta-
bolise and work through the murderous
phantasy. If he stays sitting down (or espe-
cially if he responds to the phantasy with
disapproval, anger, sadness, fear, reinforcing
the child's sense that it might become too
real), the murderous thoughts remain un-
metabolised. They may pass back from the
pretend mode to the mode of psychic equiva-
lence, and an opportunity for the child to
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I.
see his idea as an idea is lost. Rebecca's
mother's depression following the death of
her own father may well have made it in-
tolerable for her to contemplate Rebecca's
feelings of loss at the time that she felt them,
and the mother's reaction of unmanageable
sadness pushed Rebecca back towards rein-
stating a mode of psychic equivalence.
Separation anxiety
The acute separation anxiety that brought
Rebecca to analysis in the first place may
also be understood as pointing to a lack of
continuity in the experience of the psycho-
logical self. We have described previously
(Fonagy et al., 1993; Fonagy & Target, 1995)
a dialectical theory of early self-development,
according to which the infant finds an image
of himself, in his mother's mind, as an in-
dividual with thoughts and feelings. It is
this which is internalised, and around which
the child's sense of self (self-consciousness
or core self) can be formed. Rebecca's
mother was, apparently, depressed and an-
gry when Rebecca was born. The baby had
not been planned, and the father abandoned
the mother in response to news of the preg-
nancy. Rebecca's mother felt the baby to be
a disastrous threat to her independence, de-
stroying her hopes for the future. We suggest
that the infant Rebecca, in searching for her
mother's perception of her and her states of
mind, may have been confronted with the image
of a wrecker, a ruthless invader who steals
what is most precious: a pirate, in Rebecca's
later fearful picture. This idea of the pirate,
like the ideas about her father's disappear-
ance, became all too real for Rebecca by
becoming part of the world of 'psychic equiva-
lence' rather than of play and phantasy.
Rebecca may have clung to her mother
not only because of fear of the destructive-
ness felt to threaten both of them, but also
because the only time Rebecca could get
away from the negative 'pirate' image of
herself, internalised from the early mother,
was paradoxically when she was with her
229
real, external mother of the present. When
with her mother, she could externalise the
alien, frightening image and retain a clearer,
uncontaminated image of herself. When
she battled with her mother, as she fre-
quently did, this introjected image no longer
obscured Rebecca's self-representation and
she felt obvious relief. However, there was
a cost to this strategy, in that Rebecca
needed to stay physically close to the object
if she was to avoid the unacceptable image
emerging as the core experience of herself,
as it did in her daytime terrors and night-
mares.
The integration of the two modes ofpsychic
reality through the psychoanalytic process
So Rebecca's thoughts, about the danger-
ousness of her own and her mother's ag-
gression and sexuality, seem partly to have
blocked the development and integration of
Rebecca's psychic reality, and forced her to
retain a part of her mind in which thought
and actuality were treated as the same. This
deprived her of a form of protection that
would have followed integration of the two
modes of thinking. With the capacity to
mentalise, to see ideas as merely ideas and
not facts, to play with different points of
view, there comes the capacity to test ideas
against reality and therefore to moderate
their impact. Insulated from knowledge of
what could or could not 'really' happen in
relation to her anxiety-provoking ideas, Re-
becca's terror of her thoughts and feelings in
this area was magnified as these again and
again surfaced, to be experienced as 'real'.
The same phenomenon emerged in the
transference, where the analyst could be either
Rebecca's analyst or her father, but never
the analyst representing the father. When he
drew her attention to the dual reality, that
he looked like a daddy but was actually a
therapist, Rebecca responded by making the
father more real, someone she had really
met who really looked like the analyst. How-
ever, we can also see how important it was
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230 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
that the analyst could play with Rebecca's
ideas and recognise that they were part of
her internal world and not external reality.
The loss involved in giving up the fulfilment
of a wish was balanced, over the course of
the analysis, by the reassurance of finding
that her fears were fears rather than facts,
and that although they could not be mas-
tered by Rebecca alone, they could be played
with and made safer in the 'potential space'
between two minds.
Rebecca was able to arrive at an integra-
tion represented by the analyst/father, real
as a subjective experience, but at the same
time known to be a mere idea. In her role
play, Rebecca moved the experience of her
thoughts and feelings to a developmentally
higher level, where these became increasingly
differentiated. She repeatedly explored the
boundaries of her self-experience, looking at
herself from within (as pretend Rebecca) and
without (as Hannah), while also constantly
monitoring whether she was recognised and
understood by the other, in the specific role
which she herself assigned. Her play allowed
her to adopt numerous perspectives, each
one offering a test of her imagined place in
relation to the object, each self-represent-
ation clearly separate and distinct from the
internal picture of the object. She adopted
the point of view of the third, observing a
relationship between herself and the object,
and thus greatly strengthening the coherence
and stability of her representation of herself
as she related to others. In this way, she
could relinquish the wish reinforced by psy-
chic equivalence, and exchange it for the
defences that mentalising offers the child.
This happens gradually, in ordinary fam-
ily life or in analysis, not just by addressing
particular thoughts, but by addressing
thoughts in general. In Rebecca's game, what
was important was not simply playing with
the idea of an absent father, but setting up
a structure where the thoughts and feelings
of each person could be imagined and con-
sidered. In time, and with much analytic
work, she became far clearer about the ana-
lyst's role. When the analyst addressed her
shadow game with the daddy giraffe as a
consolation for her Oliver Twist feelings of
abandonment, she was able to set the analyst
right and indicate that she knew that the
experience that it created was like a shadow,
real yet at the same time illusory.
The background to Rebecca's problems
was a state of confusion and ignorance about
the actual circumstances of her family, re-
sulting from the mother's unwillingness to
contemplate them, which made thinking about
the possible feelings of those around her
more frightening than usual, and made it
impossible for her to work her anxieties out
without help. In the absence of an adult at
home who could help her bridge the gap
between inner and outer, she needed another
adult, the analyst, to provide the necessary
frame for play and reflection.
Thus the analyst's play with the child has
an important development-enhancing func-
tion. Not only is it his sole route to engaging
the child's representational system, but it is
also a developmental opportunity for the
child to gain better understanding of the
nature of mental states. In Rebecca's play,
all the characters (eight in all) felt, thought,
believed, wished and desired, and their shared
world (the consulting room) brought into
sharp contrast their different perceptions,
their sometimes painfully incongruent expe-
riences of the world. Naturally their conflicts,
worries and relationships provided a rich
source of material for interpretation as well
as insight into Rebecca's perceptions and
feelings about the transference. But there
was something else. Rebecca used her play
with the analyst to test out her ideas about
how her own mind and the mind of others
functioned. When she repeated again and
again the scenario where the analyst (as
Hannah's father) was startled to find Re-
becca where Hannah was expected, she not
only enjoyed the fantasy of a surprise reun-
ion with her father, or the reversal of the
normal dominance of grown-up over child,
but also she practised, in a safer context
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PLAYING WITH REALITY I. 231

than her home environment normally pro- to enhance the development of represent-
vided, the experience of the fallibility of ation in the child's psychic reality by being
adults' beliefs, and rejoiced in finding herself constantly one step ahead of the child's
again and again in the adult's mind. experience of his mental self. Thus child
We suggest that where the parent is unable psychoanalysis is not just the removal of
to incorporate and think about a piece of obstacles to mentalisation, it is the exercise
reality, and cannot then enable the child to of a developmental universal in purer form.
do so safely through playing with the fright- The analyst must begin by acknowledging
ening ideas, this reality remains to be expe- the compelling reality of the child's experi-
rienced in the mode of psychic equivalence. ence, entering into the pretend world, only
Neither child nor parent can 'metabolise' the gradually showing her through contact with
thoughts, and the 'unthinkable' thoughts are his mental experience that it is a set of
passed on from one generation to the next. representations that can be shared, played
On an everyday scale, Rebecca's mother could with and changed.
not help her with the unacceptable reality
of her fatherless situation (particularly once
the mother shared this following her bereave- TRANSLATIONS OF SUMMARY
ment). On a massive scale, traumas such as
Holocaust experiences may be passed on, or Les auteurs de eet article traitent des changements
dans la perception de l'enfant de la realite psychique
not, depending on the parents' capacity to pendant Ie developpement normal, soulignant une
allow the trauma to be part of shared reality, modification majeure dans la comprehension de l'en-
which can be thought and talked about, not fant des esprits ('theorie de l'esprit') au stade oedipien.
only relived as a continuing and fixed reality. lIs illustrent eette transition avec un materiel clinique
issue de l'analyse d'une fille de 4 ans. lIs soutiennent
Our acceptance of a dialectical perspective que Ie tres jeune enfant utilise deux formes de realite
of self-development shifts the traditional psy- psychique qu'ils ont appele mode 'equivalent psy-
choanalytical emphasis from internalisation chique' et mode 'pretendu', qui different essentielle-
of the containing object to the internalisation ment dans la relation supposee entre realite interne et
realite externe. L'integration des modes doubles en un
of the thinking self from within the contain- mode reflechi singulier s'acheve normalement autour
ing object. This is what makes such concepts de l'age de 4 ans, avec l'affect dominant la cognition:
as thinking inherently intersubjective, shared l'enfant comprend tout d'abord que les gens ont des
experience is part of the 'very logic' (Sellars, sentiments differents, puis qu'il est possible qu'ils aient
des pensees differentes au sujet d'une meme realite
1963, p. 189) of mental state concepts. All externe. Les auteurs decrivent Ie developpement psy-
analytic work with young children contains chologique normal et la pathologie nevrotique ou
an element of this developmental process l'integration de ees deux modes de fonctionnement n'a
He realisee que partiellement.
and some patients' treatment may be almost
entirely focused on the elaboration of the Die Autoren dieser Arbeit diskutieren Verander-
self as a mental or psychological entity. The ungen in der kindlichen Wahrnehmung der psychi-
reflective aspect of the analytic process is schen Realitat in der normalen Entwicklung und
machen deutlich, daB es wahrend der odipalen Phase
understanding and not simply empathy (the zu einem grundlegenden Wandel im kindlichen Ver-
accurate mirroring of mental state). In order standnis der Psyche (Theorie der Psyche) kommt. Sie
to move the child from the mode of psychic illustrieren diesen Ubergang mit Material aus der Ana-
equivalence to the mentalising mode, analytic lyse eines 4-jahrigen Madchens. Sielegen dar, daB das
sehr junge Kind zwei Formen psychischer Realitat
reflection, of whatever orientation, cannot verwendet, die sie als Modus des 'psychischen Aqui-
just 'copy' the child's internal state, but has valents' und des 'Vortauschens' bezeichnet haben.
to move beyond it and go a step further, Diese unterscheiden sich vor allem in der vermuteten
offering a different, yet experientially appro- Beziehung zwischen innerer und aulserer Realitat. Die
Integration des dualen Modus zu einem einzigen
priate re-presentation. The analyst's mind reflektiven Modus wird normalerweise mit etwa 4
acts as scaffolding (Vygotsky, 1966) designed Jahren abgeschlossen und dies beeinfluBt die haupt-
Copyrighted Material. For use only by UCL. Reproduction prohibited. Usage subject to PEP terms & conditions (see terms.
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232 PETER FONAGY AND MARY TARGET
sachliche Art der Wahrnehmung: das Kind versteht
zuerst, daB Menschen unterschiedliche Gefiihle ha-
ben, und dann, daB sie unterschiedliche Gedanken
tiber dieselbe aufere Realitat haben konnen. Die Au-
toren beschreiben normales psychisches Wachstum
und neurotische Pathologie, in der die Integration
dieser zwei Funktionsmodi nur teilweise erreicht wor-
den ist.
Los autores de este articulo tratan de los cambios
que tienen lugar en la percepci6n infantil de la realidad
psiquica durante el desarrollo normal, destacando un
cambio importante en la comprensi6n de la mente por
parte del niiio ('teoria de la mente'), en el estadio
edipico. Ilustran este paso con material del analisis de
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Peter Fonagy and Mary Target Copyright © Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1996
The Anna Freud Centre and the Psychoanalysis
Unit University College
21 Maresfield Gardens
London NW3 2RH
(MS. received 5/9/95)
(Revised MS. received 19/2/96)
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