Reflections on the concept "The patient's psychic reality"

The concept "the patient's psychic reality" delineates a fundamental epistemological and clinical position regarding the notion of reality. Two distinctions are implied: the patient's psychic reality as opposed to that of someone else (e.g. the analyst); and psychic vs. objective reality. These delineations are repeatedly obscured. While blurring the boundaries between the patient's and the analyst's vantage points, we fail to distinguish between hypothesis and evidence, bypassing nuances of clinical data that do not fit into the course we seemingly have found. Reflecting more rigorously on the question of how to arrive at what we believe to know may help us to find our way to more profound pathways, heretofore unconscious.