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PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A METHOD OF CURE assumes a need for or a tendency toward integration. This tendency has been described as or attributed to the pressure of the unconscious or repressed to become conscious, the working of Eros seeking to unite units and objects, and/or to the integrative capacities of the ego. These are obviously abstractions utilized to express the idea that the human being seems to have the need, as we might put it in the idiom of our day, to "get it together"—to get aspects of the self together, to establish links between different psychic experiences, to make connections with others. Getting things together does not exclude differentiation and taking cognizance of reality; on the contrary, it is furthered by them. But certain inescapable discrepancies in maturation and development, likely traumata and perhaps even constitutional imbalances are seen as throwing up powerful obstacles which become part of the psyche and act to disrupt and hinder the integrative trends. Internal conflict or discontinuity is therefore inevitable. The persistance of conflict is abetted by resistance, by the reluctance or unwillingness to become aware of conflict and to engage one's energies toward its resolution. The analytic attempt to cure is the attempt to facilitate integration by way of working with the resistances. Mutative work in psychoanalysis is the successful overcoming of resistance.
The notion of inherently integrative forces at work can be referred to a biological or an organismic model, without thereby reducing psychoanalysis to biology. Both the patient's experience which we deal with and the process we engage ourselves in with the other person seem to me to have an organic-like quality. Psychoanalysis does not follow a linear sequence. It has, rather, a Gestalt character, reaching for closure.
Insofar as the integration is with another, it takes on the form of a dialogue under pressure. This dialogue under pressure psychoanalysis has in com