Conceptions of Structure in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis—A Reading of the Literature1

THE CONCEPT OF STRUCTURE IS INVOKED in most references to psychological processes that are stable over time. The idea of structure grows from the assumption that experience and behavior are appearances or manifestations of underlying templates or foundations, which themselves may never be observable. In the psychological and psychoanalytic literature of the twentieth century, the assumption of structure is nearly ubiquitous. Apart from neurophysiology, it is the primary way we have had to grasp and represent in theoretical terms how and why conduct and experience manifest regularities.

Structural concepts are backbones in all fields defined by the study of the human condition. Cognitive psychology, for example, is devoted to the identification of the regularities in our processing of information. Advances are therefore measured in terms of structural theories that can account for old data and predict new ones. Some of these mechanisms are assumed to be direct manifestations of neurophysiology. Others, though, are combinations of neurophysiology with representations of past experience, encoded and transformed into channels for new experience. A newly proposed cognitive mechanism, for example, might allow the established theories to stretch around otherwise anomalous phenomena of perception, thought, or memory. In linguistics the