This passage had a big impact on my thinking, as did the following one from Joan Riviere's classic Kleinian essay 'On the Genesis of Psychical Conflict in Early Infancy' (1952):
I wish especially to point out... that from the very beginning of life, on Freud's own hypothesis, the psyche responds to the reality of its experiences by interpreting them — or rather, misinterpreting them — in a subjective manner that increases its pleasure and preserves it from pain. This act of subjective interpretation of experience, which it carries out by means of the processes of introjection and projection, is called by Freud hallucination; and it forms the foundation of what we mean by phantasy-life. The phantasy-life of the individual is thus the form in which his real internal and external sensations and perceptions are interpreted and represented to himself in his mind under the influence of the pleasure-pain principle. (It seems to me that one has only to consider for a moment to see that, in spite of all the advances man has made in adaptation of a kind to external reality, this primitive and elementary function of his psyche — to misinterpret his perceptions for his own satisfaction — still retains the upper hands in the minds of the great majority of even civilized adults.) (Riviere, 1952, p. 41).
