The Intrapsychic Process and its Analysis—A Recent Line of Thought and its Current Implications

From a series of papers in recent years, a common core emerged which I will extract and elaborate in the present presentation. While the original approach in each instance was from a different although contiguous point of view, such as in one, an investigation into the dynamics and structure of intrapsychic conflict (1963b), (1963c), in another the psychoanalytic theory of anxiety (1955), (1968c), and in another a study of the metapsychology of psychic trauma (1967b), what was reached in all was a "microdynamic" view into the interior of the psychic apparatus, and a formulation of the sequential series of events which take place during the course of intrapsychic activity. What emerged was in effect a psychoanalytic model of "the intrapsychic process", with a particular emphasis and elaboration in each case on the specific subject under study and that particular portion of the intrapsychic sequence.

As a contribution to the present theme of "recent developments" I should like to use the composite model which evolved as the base and starting point. The "developments" which will be pointed to will be seen to exist, I submit, at various points of this composite line of thought. These will include "developments" in our theoretical understanding of the intrapsychic process itself, with respect to intrapsychic conflict, ego functioning, and the theory of anxiety; derivative observations on recent developments in the theory of technique; and applications to problems of psychoanalytic research, relations to contiguous fields, and especially the contributions to be made by psychoanalysis to pressing contemporary social problems. Clarifications and amendments in the psychic interior will thus be shown to reverberate, not unexpectedly, to many connected surface areas. The "developments" will be seen to fan out from the alterations and clarifications at the central intrapsychic core to technical and global social applications.