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One of the most common misuses of Freud’s notion of the “reality principle” is confusing it with the adaptation of the patient to reality. In doing so, many psychoanalysts and therapists take it upon themselves to be the harbingers of “realism,” advocating for an objective reality to which the patient must succumb. One particularly prominent claim is that we should "wake up and smell the coffee," breaking out of our fantasies to meet objective reality as it is. However, Freud never formulated this naïve conception of the reality principle as representing a single objective reality that shapes our thoughts.
Contrary to these claims, Freud postulated that the reality principle solely enables the subject to delay immediate satisfaction in the aim of future satisfaction. In this pamphlet, Leon Brenner develops a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Following Freud and Lacan, he claims that the subject must come to terms with its impossible relationship with the object in objective reality. Instead, Brenner offers a conception of psychic reality and the idea that its major coordinates are not shaped by real objective facts but by fantasy formations that are in constant movement. According to this conception, instead of seeking to extract the Real from objective reality, to continue living, the subject must go against reality in as much as it is conceived of as a Real in relation to which one can only be an object.
Leon S. Brenner (Ph.D) is a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic theorist from Berlin. Brenner’s work draws from the Freudian and Lacanian traditions of psychoanalysis, and his interest lies in the understanding of the relationship between culture and psychopathology. His book The Autistic Subject: On the Threshold of Language, is a bestseller in psychology in Palgrave/Springer publishing in 2021. He is a founder of Lacanian Affinities Berlin(laLAB) and Unconscious Berlin.