To return to our Narcissistic infant, we are now impressed with the fact that one thing of the utmost importance in the first years of its life is that it shall gradually come into contact with reality, shall discover that all things do not belong to it, that its omnipotent feelings are based purely upon phantasy and not upon reality; and upon the method of its disillusionment and the age at which this begins largely depend the future powers of adaptation of the child to its surroundings. It has now become obvious that the new-born infant lives in a world of phantasy, in which, the relative importance of itself to things outside itself is not merely distorted but is entirely absent. And if we can suppose a child kept artificially in this condition till it reached adult life, every wish satisfied instantaneously, every force it knows directed entirely towards gratifying its immediate desires, we do not require much imagination to understand how absolutely helpless and lost this omnipotent creature would be if suddenly turned into the world to face life and reality. His one desire would be to return to his omnipotent state, his one effort to keep at bay reality and turn it into the pleasant phantasy of the previous twenty years. For he would surely, before his disillusionment, have really come to believe himself omnipotent, the only real thing in a phantasy world of his own fashioning and dreaming. An extreme case of this kind is, of course, an impossibility. But there are many and various degrees in which it is approached. Probably the nearest approach to it may be found in cases where some sort of moral or mental conflict has been too much for an extremely Narcissistic mind, which has then completely regressed, refused to recognise the outer world, and developed a certain form of insanity; and from this stage of complete Narcissistic regression all degrees and kinds of manifestations of it may be found, until we reach at the other end of our list a person who expects everyone around to consult his wishes and peculiarities or who is merely somewhat impatient, or inclined to irritability, or merely over-sensitive to either mental or physical pain. There is no more certain fact than that if an infant be allowed to postpone its acquaintance with reality too long it becomes fixed in a more or less degree in conditions in which phantasy plays too prominent a part, and regression of some kind takes place as it meets with real difficulties. CHAPTER VI FACT AND PHANTASY