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What is apparent in clinical work is that individuals with maladaptations demonstrate that their mental processes are often skewed: they solipsistically interpret their experiences according to self-referent organizations, or they tend to exclude knowledge of their inner experiences while interpreting the external world. The development of human equilibrium, however, requires the integration of subjective and objective realities. Albeit not a conscious process, individuals are constantly monitoring, assessing, and processing these two forms of reality. When these realities are irreconcilable, and such dissonance creates an unpleasant affective state, individuals unconsciously modify the meaning and valence given to one or both forms of reality. Because the lack of integration is painful, the individual must resort to distortions of processing of reality, thereby creating a pseudo-integration which is vulnerable.
Before presenting clinical material which illustrates how such processing of reality becomes distorted, an orientation might be helpful. Many scholars have addressed the problem of how experience is recorded, dynamically remembered, and translated into psychic structure. The psychoanalytic school is based traditionally on a conflict model: out of conflict and the resultant anxiety arises the motivation for intrapsychic change or growth. It is the nature of the conflict which has distinguished earlier schools of psychoanalytic thought. The later contributions which make up the “widening scope” of psychoanalysis, however, broaden psychoanalytic theories of development. It is these areas that I will address, but first I will review the authors' works which have particularly influenced my clinical work and the theoretical orientations which are an outgrowth of that clinical work.
Freud (1900, 1911) postulated conflict between two fundamentally different