You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The main purpose of my pre-published paper was to examine how the structural theory may be used to clarify certain problems of symptom and character formation. In addition, I suggested some areas for future investigations inherent in the approach which I proposed. In pursuing these goals, I decided to limit the discussion to symptoms as defined by Freud, i.e. in terms of a break-through of a substitute form of drive gratification in the face of opposition by the ego. This point of departure was chosen not only to emphasize the ubiquity of conflict, but also to demonstrate the crucial role that conflict plays in the genesis of many forms of psychic resultants, e.g. character traits, symptoms, sublimations, and even normal development. It is important, therefore, to state clearly the role of conflict in psycho-analysis. This is necessary because of the tendency discernible in many quarters to trace the significant conflict in symptom formation earlier and earlier in the development of the individual and to regard both neurotic symptom formation and character traits as direct reduplications, i.e. regressive reactivations of these very early events. This trend shows itself in many forms. I will cite only a few illustrations.
On the one hand, there are those, e.g. Melanie Klein and her followers, who posit a very elaborate content to the mental life of the infant in the first months. In their view, conflict is expressed in terms of elaborately detailed concepts of objects and in a meticulously defined fantasy function. They assume the existence at a very early age of a degree of psychic structure which runs counter to our knowledge of psychic development.
On the other hand there are those who see the conflicts underlying symptom formation as repetitions of very early psychical events in a conflict over moods and affects which are expressed very early, and in an interaction of primitive self representations.
My first point, therefore, was to emphasize the basic prin