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A book by Charles Brenner is always an important event in psychoanalysis, beginning in 1955 with his Elementary Textbook of Psychoanalysis; going on in 1964 to Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory (written with Jacob Arlow); and continuing in 1976 with Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict. In these books, as well as in his many articles, Brenner has consistently positioned himself as a strong and persuasive advocate of the structural theory serving to explain, expand, and advance that theory unperturbed and undaunted by its many challenges from within the field. The book under review here, The Mind in Conflict, continues within this same mode, with a careful and scholarly explication of psychic conflict. In addition, Brenner, through his intensive focus on the reaches of compromise formation, offers an application of psychoanalysis as a general psychology to an understanding of dreams, slips, and errors; transference and countertransference; character traits; choice of vocation, avocation, and love object; and such cultural products as myth, legend, and religion. As he states in the final chapter, 'Normal Compromise Formations', 'My principal goals … have been, first, to substantiate the proposition that a dynamic interaction among the components of psychic conflict underlies much or all of the subjectively conscious and objectively observable phenomena of adult psychic life and behavior and, second, to explicate as fully as I could what that proposition really means, i.e., what its observable referents are and what data substantiate it'. But Brenner's stated goals to the contrary notwithstanding, the great importance of this book to our view is the clarity with which a particular set of psychoanalytic propositions is advanced, and the significant challenge they pose to clinical theory and practice.
In his introduction, Brenner reaffirms the scientific status of psychoanalysis by virtue of its postulating cause and effect relationships whic