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One of Charles Brenner's many virtues has been his clear-eyed scrutiny of our ambiguous theoretic lexicon and his astringent foraging in our theoretic attic. He has repeatedly demonstrated that some of our terms which had seemed to be clear enough were actually ambiguous. His present paper expresses more clearly than ever his wish to strip away unnecessary and anachronistic accretions of meanings in our terms and theories. He has challenged us in the past and now does so again by stimulating us to join him in asking whether we still need certain conceptual tools. Are these tools and terms doing the job we think they are? Are we losing something by perpetuating their use? In this case he concludes that it is time to seriously consider abandoning the concepts of id, ego, and superego because these terms erroneously separate and disconnect the components of conflict in the human mind.
First I will remind readers of what Brenner does not doubt. He is still convinced of the value of the notion of conflict. Nor does he doubt the nature of the four components of conflict mediated by compromise formation. It will be recalled that these are the drive derivatives, the unpleasure evoked by the drive derivatives as these relate to the calamities of childhood, the defenses, and self-punitive trends. These four elements of conflict he considers still essential. Brenner then proposes major replacements for the psychic agencies. We should think of the drive derivatives rather than the id, of a person in the ordinary sense of a whole, entire human being instead