Discussion of 'The Intrapsychic Process and its Analysis: A Recent Line of Thought and its Current Implications'

This paper starts with an extract from a series of papers I have written in recent years—on intrapsychic conflict, the theory of anxiety, and psychic trauma—from which a common core emerged, which has to do with a 'microdynamic' view into the interior of the psychic apparatus. In the present paper I have attempted to isolate a composite thread which has run through all of them, and which delineates the sequential series of events which take place during the course of intrapsychic activity. What results is in effect a psychoanalytic model of what I refer to as 'the intrapsychic process'. Using this model as a base, I proceeded next to examine what 'developments' may be considered to stem from this composite line of thought. These were seen to exist at various points, in the theoretical understanding of the intrapsychic process itself, with respect to intrapsychic conflict, ego-functioning and the theory of anxiety; some derivative observations on recent developments in the theory of technique; and in applications to problems of research, relations to contiguous fields and contemporary social issues.

I will not attempt to repeat here in any detail the intrapsychic sequential chain of events, from stimulus to response, which I have come to, and which has been described in several previous papers, mainly on intrapsychic conflict. However, what I have done in summary is to try to elucidate in microscopic detail the successive sequence of steps, which in the literature is frequently grouped together, which takes place mainly before the anxiety signal occurs, and then what happens typically after the signal itself.

One such phase is a tentative experimental signal type of conflict, which takes place before the anxiety signal occurs, and which is usually bypassed in our descriptions by saying that the ego simply 'uses' anxiety as a signal. In this preliminary step, the ego, by permitting a small and controlled amount of in