And yet Freud, followed, among others, by Bion, is asking us to imagine something that is seemingly wildly improbable: that there can be only unrealistic wanting, but that unrealistic wanting can be satisfied only by realistic satisfactions; everything else being frustration in disguise, rage and vengefulness, what Cavell calls the murdering of the world. We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it.
