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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 definitio