Charles Brenner

I am grateful to Dr. Boesky for his thorough and penetrating discussion. He has raised a number of points to which I shall try to reply later. The one I shall start with is, I think, the most important and the most central to the topic under discussion.

Dr. Boesky argues forcefully for the retention of the concepts ego, superego, and id as “functional and developmental groupings of three major types” because the concept of three such agencies gives us “a better longitudinal view … of the components of conflict.” If I understand him correctly, Dr. Boesky agrees that when one is discussing a particular patient's conflicts, that is, in the course of day-to-day clinical work, one thinks and talks about drive derivatives, unpleasure, defenses, and compromise formation and not about id, ego, and superego. But, he maintains, to understand and talk about the genesis of current conflict, to relate the present to the past in an intelligible way, one needs the idea of three functionally distinguishable agencies.

My response to this assertion is to ask for an illustration. I myself cannot think of one from my own clinical experience. An understanding of the developmental vicissitudes of conflict and compromise formation do not seem to me to require the assumption of functionally distinguishable agencies of or within the mind.

I would add the following. If the three mental agencies are distinguishable “functional… groupings,” it should be possible to specify the basis on which they are to be distinguished. Can Dr. Boesky tell us which functional or developmental criteria characterize the id and which the ego? I don't see the justification for calling id and ego distinguishable mental agencies unless id is to be defined as something more than or other than the sum of sexual and aggressive wishes and ego as something more or other than the sum of unpleasure associated with those wishes and of the defenses that serve to minimize that unpleasure. To repeat, conflict between wish and de