When reality becomes too much to bear we can comfort ourselves with fantasies, which is wise provided we remember that the stories we tell ourselves are fantasies. If we fail to do this, if we think that our fantasies are real and true, we join the forces of unreason. In the ranks of therapists there are some who do just this. They develop a logic which conveniently ignores those constructions which do not fit their theories and thus they collude with the forces of unreason...
Such collusion seems on many occasions to go beyond a mere failure of nerve. It seems instead to be an inability to understand and accept the peculiarity of our existence.
This peculiarity is that, while the world we live in seems to be solid and real and shared with others, what we each experience is our individual construction. We can imagine events which occur without any relationship to us, but what we have is not knowledge about such events but theories about such events. In fact, everything we know is a theory, a construction, and this construction is inside our head...[and] our construction can come from nowhere other than our past experience, and no two people, not even identical twins, have the same experience.
The Comforts of Unreason (1997)
Use the link below to read the full 1997 article The Comforts of Unreason posted on the website of Australian psychologist DOROTHY ROWE:
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