Indeterminacy & Compromise Formation: Implications for a psychoanalytic Theory of Mind

The meanings of communications between analyst and analysand are replete with alternative interpretations and ambiguity. Interpersonal meaning is inherently indeterminate, and so too is intrapsychic meaning. Indeterminacy of meaning, in fact, is an intrinsic feature of all psychic experience. In the clinical domain, indeterminate meaning is the psychic basis for forming and sustaining neurotic patterns of behaviour. This recognition has important implications for effective psychoanalytic intervention. Despite the inherent indeterminacy of meaning, it is not true that ‘anything goes’ when trying to make sense of the data that comprise psychic experience. Wittingly or not, analysts employ specific operational constraints to decide which among numerous alternative, competing interpretive schemes is the one that we accept as the ‘accurate’ and ‘true’ understanding of our experience. These constraints are employed by all rational systems and are important components of scientific theories and other explanatory domains. Neurotic symptoms and compromise formations do not recognise these constraints. They make freer use of indeterminate meaning to satisfy simultaneously the multiple competing demands of mental existence. Indeterminacy underlies the intense gratification afforded by neurotic symptoms and other transitional phenomena, in that it allows us to gratify simultaneously and as fully as possible our potentially contradictory desires that conflict with social and moral proscriptions. This simultaneous gratification afforded by compromise formation is why neurotic symptoms are so intractable to treatment. If conflict is one defining feature of the mind, then indeterminacy and compromise formation are the others.