Contributions to a psychoanalytic theory of perception: The hallucinatory regression to the thing of desire

Abstract

This article seeks to examine the relationships between perception, psychic reality, and desire from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis. In the first part of the study, the "scheme" of the psychic apparatus proposed by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), presenting the mechanism of hallucinatory regression, was demonstrated as revealing the temporal structure of desire, within which the problem of perception receives an actual psychoanalytic sense. In the second part, the emergence of the notion of das Ding (the Thing), already present in Project for a scientific psychology (1895), is observed, indicating that the field of perceptual phenomena is articulated in terms of the relationship of the subject to the "fellow human being" (Nebensmensch), and, thus, to the Thing of desire, in addressing the constituent helplessness of psychic life.