“All groups operate by means of phantasy. The type of experience a group gives us is one of the main reasons, if not for some people the only reason, for being in a group. What do people want to get from the experience of being in a particular set of human collectivities? The close-knit groups that occur in some families and other groupings are bound together by the need to find pseudo-real experience that can be found only through the modality of phantasy. This means that the family is not experienced as the modality of phantasy but as ‘reality’. However, ‘reality’ in this sense is not a modality, but a quality attachable to any modality. If a family member has a tenable position within the family phantasy system, his call to leave the system in any sense is likely only to come from outside the phantasy system. We vary in readiness, and in desire, to emerge from the unconscious phantasy systems we take to be our realities. As long as we are in apparently tenable positions, we find every reason not to suppose that we are in a false sense of reality or unreality, security or insecurity, identity or lack of identity. A false social sense of reality entails, among other things, phantasy unrecognized as such. If [someone] begins to wake up from the [group] phantasy system, he can only be classified as mad or bad by [that group] since to them their phantasy is reality, and what is not their phantasy is not real.” SelfGroup Identity Book:SELF AND OTHERS Source: SELF AND OTHERS
“Thus, in the relationship that the self has with itself, one finds a second duality developing whereby the inner self splits to have a sado-masochistic relationship with itself. When this happens, the inner self, which has arisen, we suggested, in the first place as a means of clinging to a precarious sense of identity, begins to lose even what identity it had to begin with.” SelfMental IllnessSchizophreniaSadomasochim Book:The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness Source: The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness