Response

I am of course most appreciative of Dr. Kramer's words of commendation and agreement and receive them with thanks. The one quibble he expressed was over the use of the word conflict. Here 1 agree with him. Conflict isn't just the right word. When the end result is a normal compromise formation, as in the illustration he gave of the patient who enjoyed training horses, the accompanying conscious emotion is at worst neutral, often pleasurable, and sometimes very much so. In such a case, in which satisfaction of sexual and aggressive wishes is so obvious, why use the word conflict, Dr. Kramer asks. Isn't it better to speak of interaction among various forces or tendencies within the mind than of conflict among them?

My own answer is a qualified yes. As Dr. Kramer pointed out, his patient's interest in horse training was a disguised version of her wish to beat a man (her father?), to possess his penis, and to be a man herself. Those wishes were opposed to an extent, at least. They didn't appear in consciousness without disguise. In their disguised form they were pleasurable, but only in disguise could they be so. So to use the word interaction requires that much of a gloss. One has to add to the term interaction the explanation that there is some degree of opposition or conflict among the interacting tendencies. Similarly, if one uses the word conflict one must add that the wishes that arouse opposition and conflict are, at the same time, satisfied and must make clear that in some (normal) cases the satisfaction is very considerable.

I speak of conflict in order to remain closer to our usual way of expressing ourselves; in order, perhaps, to seem to differ as little as possible from what Freud wrote on the subject. Maybe Dr. Kramer is correct in saying that I should be bolder and use the term interaction as being closer to my meaning than is the term conflict. After all, Dr.