Abstract
Conflict, especially unconscious intrapsychic conflict, has been defining of psychoanalysis from its inception. Indeed, several authors in this volume cite Anton Kris’s remark that “psychoanalysis is human behavior from the point of view of conflict.” Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Conflict gathers together a group of highly distinguished authors to explore such questions as: Is conflict inherent in the human psyche, or does it emerge as a result of some sort of environmental failure? What are the central antagonists in the conflict? Is conflict always primary in psychopathology? And how should psychoanalytic therapy address issues of conflict?
The sixteen essays in this volume represent a wide variety of perspectives: mainstream American psychiatry, object relations, self psychology, Klein and the neo-Kleinians, attachment theory, Lacan and the French school, neuroscience, molecular genetics, cognitive psychology, and both child and adult analysis. Most of the authors are in private practice.
In the opening essay, Morris Eagle traces Freud’s developing views of conflict, from his understanding of hysteria as based on ideas that are “incompatible” with consciousness, through the structural theory to the murky, late opposition of Eros versus Thanatos. What I find most provocative in this essay is Eagle’s discussion of an ambiguity inherent in Freud’s late aphorism, “Where id was, there ego shall be”—where it was there I shall be—suggesting, on the one hand, that in a successful therapeutic treatment the instincts will be kept in check by the ego and, on the other, that an ideal therapeutic outcome “is one in which the I (the self) is expanded to now include and integrate hitherto unintegrated aspects of oneself that had been defensively excluded . . .” (p. 14). This second reading, Eagle remarks, “places Freud in a broad spiritual-philosophical context in which unity of the personality is an over-riding and lifelong quest, reflected, for example, in Kierkegaard’s definition of purity of heart as willing one thing . . .” (p. 16). (Freud suggests that integration is to be accomplished in the process of working through, a concept he never does make clear, as Eagle aptly remarks.) How one achieves “purity of heart”—how one integrates disparate and, in particular, unwelcome parts of one’s own self, or what it means to do so—strikes me as a deep psychological-philosophical question. The process is complex, for surely it will include, at least, “keeping the instincts in check,” renunciation, reflection, acknowledging and then repudiating unwelcome aspects of oneself, shaping and refining one’s values, and understanding the implications of one’s own thoughts, behavior, and desires.
Chapter 2, by Christopher Christian, continues the historical project, focusing first, of course, on Freud and the rise of ego psychology, then proceeding through the work of Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and Charles Brenner to the insight contained in the concept of “compromise formation”: that both in health and in psychopathology there is always a tenuous balance between a full expression of one’s desires and their control in the face of conflict. In the historical story, as Christian tells it, the major challenge to conflict theory came in “the relational turn” with its focus on transference and countertransference. But, as he says, the fact that conflict is understood differently in the different clinical theories does not mean that it has lost its centrality. In fact, that is an implication of the book generally.
In chapter 3, Fred Busch remarks—relaying a lovely insight he attributes to Marilia Aisenstein—that psychoanalysis is “a process through which we help patients understand that they have a mind, that this mind leads them to think and do things in a particular way, and that they can understand it by seeing what comes to mind, reflecting on it and playing with it” (p. 40). Drawing on research in neuroscience, Busch claims that essential to this process is the transformation of unconscious, presymbolic “encodings” that are closer to impulses than to thoughts, into mental representations that slow down the processing of information and make reflection possible. Ignoring conflict as a source of the problems that patients bring to us “robs them of the chance to build more complex representations via understanding the fears and wishes that keep conflicts in place” (p. 41).
All too often, Anton Kris contends in chapter 4, analysts assume that the conflict patients bring to the consulting room is a matter of defense. They assume—typically—that there is a reaction formation in which one wish, say the conscious wish to be clean, defends against an unconscious, repressed wish—the “real” wish—to be dirty. In such a case the wishes converge on the conscious, acceptable wish. Kris contrasts this with “divergent” conflict in which wishes that are equally real and nondefensive pull in opposite directions.
Most interesting to me in this chapter is a discussion of mourning, which on Freud’s view requires detaching love (libido) from the lost object; thus, in a sense, mourning creates loss. But this, Kris argues, is pathological mourning, for which the clinical focus should be on helping the patient understand that she is not responsible for the loss. In normal mourning the mourner recognizes both that the loss has already occurred and that it is beyond her control. Mourning progresses as the mourner increasingly acknowledges what she already superficially knows, that the object is lost, an acknowledgment that entails, Kris implies, accepting one’s own vulnerability. This strikes me as a profound insight and one that suggests clinical interventions that may often be diametrically opposed to those involved in analyzing reaction formation.
Several of the essays in this volume deal with theorists for whom the relations between infant and mothering figure are the very essence of the mind: Fairbairn, Klein, Bion, Lacan, Laplanche, and Kohut. I group them together.
Eagle opens his essay on Fairbairn by reminding us of his basic postulate that the aim of the sexual instinct is not discharge but a love object, or person, though of course not perceived as such by the child. “The integrity and intactness of the ego depends upon the object relations rather than the drive satisfaction and the discharge of excessive excitation” (p. 68). Integrity is disrupted when a splitting occurs between the satisfying “good” object and the “bad,” unsatisfying one. “The crucial step in the formation of the endopsychic structures,” Eagle writes, “is the internalization of the depriving and frustrating experience as an internal or ‘bad’ object. . . . Generally speaking, internalization refers to the process of taking in experiences and making them part of oneself” (p. 70). Failure to do so can take the form either of repression or dissociation, a distinction that Eagle usefully discusses.
Thus, for Fairbairn, conflict is not inborn, as it was for Freud, but results from environmental failure, though the difference is academic, Eagle notes, since the environment will always be to some extent depriving.
Neil Vorus writes on Klein and the post-Kleinians, particularly Wilfred Bion. For Klein, the infant is torn between eros and the death instinct in a conflict that is constitutional. But for Klein this conflict is from the beginning interpersonal, since the psyche must direct the destructive instincts outward, creating a perception of wholly bad objects—persons conceived in partial, basically affective ways—that are split off from the good objects that are then reinternalized. The result is an inner world engaged in mortal battle. Psychic development moves toward the tolerance of inner conflict and the understanding of external persons as both good and bad—pleasurable and painful—in the stage Klein calls “mourning.”
Bion’s theories are among the most original in the history of psychoanalysis, if also the quirkiest and most abstruse. Vorus writes that Bion “dethrones conflict as the prime mover of psychological existence, replacing it with an initially pre-conflictual primary drive toward truth, which, in its earliest form, is directed at finding the means to represent and bearably know reality, via the relationship of container to contained” (p. 92). Bion conceives the infant’s earliest preverbal cognitive/affective experiences to be chaotic and anxiety-provoking. He calls these experiences “beta elements,” or “thoughts without a thinker.” “Alpha function” transforms these elements into words, dreams, verbal expressions of feeling, concepts, dialogue, which is to say the materials of thinking. In the beginning, the mother, through her intuitive responses to her infant, performs this function for the baby; she translates her child’s distress by giving names to it, thus calming and “containing” the infant. Later, once the infant has acquired concepts, it learns to perform the alpha function for itself. Thus thinking and what the infant knows as “reality” are affective and interpersonal from the start; love and hate are emotional modalities, as Vorus puts it, through which the infant comes to know the world.
On the other hand, the mother’s failure of containment—a concept similar to Winnicott’s “maternal holding environment”—is a source not only of conflict between mother and infant, but also, potentially, of a psychotic disordering of thought; beta elements that are not transformed remain in the psyche as a kind of splinter that emerges in the form of acting out and psychosis.
In chapter 7, Steven Ellman writes that with the increasing attention to the therapeutic relationship, psychoanalytic theory has downplayed the importance of conflict. In his view it remains central, though it should be addressed only after the analyst has been able, through his “containing” attitude, his state of “maternal reverie,” and his ability to listen to the patient “without memory or desire”—all Bionian terms—to create the patient’s trust that she is being listened to and heard. Addressing Bion, Ellman writes, “thinking (through linking) occurs when alpha elements emerge through a joining of pre-existing perceptual tendencies that create an anticipation, which is met with a realization in external reality (linking)” (p. 112). Like Vorus, Ellman by and large takes Bion’s vocabulary for granted. But what, we ask, is linked to what? What is the nature of the linking? What are these “pre-existing perceptual tendencies”? How is “the anticipation met with realization in external reality”? And what is it that is anticipated? In partial response, I hazard something like the following prosaic, but at least lucid, translation: “Linking” is being used here in two different senses. The first refers to the ability to connect one concept to another in a meaningful way so as, for example, to form a proposition, say “It is raining”; the second sense refers to the ability to apply a concept or a proposition to reality, that is, to judge whether or not it is raining.
Writing about Heinz Kohut and self psychology, James Fosshage describes Kohut as opposed to Freud’s view that the human being is engaged in a lifelong conflict between the drives and the environment. Kohut rather sees the self as always attempting to realize its own unique potential. The child develops through relations with others that help fulfill its basic needs—“selfobjects” in Kohut’s jargon—to be nurtured, seen, acknowledged, protected, and affirmed. The primary conflicts are with persons who in some way thwart the child’s basic need for self-fulfillment.
In chapter 9 Chris Jaenicke writes that in intersubjectivity theory—an elaboration of the views of Kohut—the source of conflict is seen to lie in those of the child’s affect states that cannot be integrated because they fail to evoke the appropriate responses in the caregiver. Jaenicke quotes Robert Stolorow: “Such unintegrated affect states become the source of lifelong inner conflict, because they are experienced as threats both to the person’s established psychological organization and to the maintenance of vitally needed ties” (p. 147).
Like Bion, Lacan is difficult at best, a heady mixture of himself, Hegel, and Freud at his most abstruse. On David Lichtenstein’s account in chapter 11, the concept of conflict as traditionally conceived in psychoanalytic theory doesn’t play much of a role in Lacan; its counterpart is the idea that the conscious sense of the self as unitary and complete is a defensive deception, behind which is hidden an unconscious, chaotic, divided subject, to which the experience of loss or lack is fundamental. I quote an excerpt from Lichtenstein that seems to me both eloquent and, uncharacteristically, intelligible. “That the lack in question is simple hunger does not stop the parent from giving it the significance of a social link, putting words to it, and treating the child’s expression of need, the cry, as an expression of longing and desire. . . . One consequence of Lacan’s placing loss at the core of the subject’s being is that it subverts any idea of the infant as a purely natural creature living outside of culture” (p. 180). The analyst’s task is not to overcome the inherent division of the patient, but “rather to reduce the illusion that it can be overcome, and thereby help people to live more gracefully in their divided state” (p. 178).
In chapter 12, Jean Laplanche focuses on the notion, Lacanian in origin, of “the enigmatic signifier,” the “message”—where a message is not necessarily verbal but can be an arrow on a wall, a smile, or the bombing of a city—that the adult communicates to the nursing child. The adult infuses her message with sexual meaning, opaque even to the adult, a meaning the child “hears” but cannot understand. (One thinks here of Sándor Ferenczi’s famous paper “Confusion of Tongues between the Adults and the Child” [1933]. I don’t know if Laplanche was familiar with it or not.)
For Laplanche, as for Lacan, the unconscious—the id—is not present from the beginning; it is “that part of the message emanating from the external other that never succeeded in being completely translated (integrated, metabolized). It is, so to speak, a ‘quintessence’ of otherness” (p. 203). I must say I do not understand this.
Adrienne Harris (chapter 10) addresses the conflict and disequilibrium that attend the process of change itself, which can be alternatively the fuel for growth or the cause of breakdown. She movingly describes the analyst’s difficulties around the patient’s change, focusing on the precocious caretaking that may have been thrust on both analyst and patient in their early lives. In these cases change will often involve, for both patient and analyst, abandoning the hope of repairing their damaged or dying objects. As she puts it, the analyst or patient moves from melancholy to mourning.
In chapter 13, Howard and Miriam Steele summarize the history of attachment theory and research as it concerns conflict. The central assumption of the theory, pioneered by John Bowlby, is that anxiety and conflict arise because of frustration imposed on the child by the external world in the form of unstable care by the primary caregiver. Bowlby was convinced that “the primary anxiety in human and other animal life is not the fear of being alone or the fear of one’s personal death, but the fear of being bereft of the loved one . . . most acutely felt in the fear of abandonment. . . . Conflict arises, then, when we feel deprived of the support we need, and conflict diminishes when the support we need is available” (pp. 214–215). Studies have shown that in cases of insecure attachment a child may be conflicted, for example, between the desire to explore the environment and the desire to secure the caregiver’s attention. Adult attachment studies have been able to identify adults who are plagued by deep unconscious conflicts arising from past loss or trauma.
Leon Hoffman, Timothy R. Rice, and Tracy A. Prout apply a developmental perspective to the construct of “conflict and compromise formation,” in the course of which they draw a distinction between what they call “externalizing” and “internalizing” behaviors. In the first, the disruptive child, for example, blames her problems on the environment; in the second, as with guilt and depression, she feels her problems to be coming from within herself. “By conceptualizing both internalizing and externalizing disturbances as [pathological, defensive] compromise formations . . . the clinician is able to understand the meaning of the child’s verbal and non-verbal communications” and to convey it to the child (p. 228). Contemporary therapeutic technique addresses the child’s defenses, in experience-near language, rather than directly confronting her conflicted thoughts and fantasies.
All of these contributions are replete with illustrative clinical material.
The final two chapters discuss research from fields abutting psychoanalysis: first, social cognition; and, second, neurobiology. Benjamin Saunders and Philip Wong focus on the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which measures the relation between the attitude that a subject holds toward an object outside of her conscious awareness, as revealed by the test, and the attitude she explicitly and verbally avows. Often the two are the same, but when they are not, the discrepancy between them is an index of conflict.
In chapter 16, Heather Berlin and John Montgomery explore the neural basis of a number of psychoanalytic concepts, including repression, dissociation, depersonalization disorder, dissociative identity disorder (“multiple personality syndrome,” a phrase the authors do not use), and the repetition compulsion. In every case the conclusions are fascinating. Regarding the repetition compulsion, for example, research shows that emotional pain activates many of the same pathways in the brain as physical pain, and that both release a significant amount of endorphin, paradoxically reinforcing behavior that is a response to the stressful stimulus.
In sum, this volume is a major contribution to the literature on conflict, and, incidentally, a good introduction to the theorists it addresses.