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REVIEWING THE PSYCHOLOGICAL reports of a number of patients who have consulted me through the decades, I was struck by how each report began with a statement about the high level of the individual's tension. This once more confirmed my impression that the motivation to seek analytic treatment comes from the experience of inner discomfort that lies beyond the individual's ability to cope. Granted this, it necessarily is part of the analytic endeavor to understand not only the nature of the current life stresses but also the underlying sources of vulnerability, that is, the ways in which the individual manages tension at the characterological level.
For clinical purposes, personality structure sometimes can best be approached in terms of how the individual organizes his response to tension, how he attempts to manage it or evade it, and how it affects his ongoing experience. This is rarely a simple or straightforward matter. In practice we find that the mechanisms involved are intricate and often elusive. In this paper, I would like to present material concerning three aspects of personality organization as it relates to tension phenomena: the degree to which a person is unable to master ordinary tensions, the ways in which unresolved feelings and conflicts constitute an additional burden on the personality structure, and finally, the manner in which excessive characterological tension leads to an inability to cope adequately with stress.
In each object relationship there is a certain amount of tension and distance, a polarity between the I and the Id, or between the I and the Thou, to use Martin Buber's terms. This tension is a necessary