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The fourth issue of volume 3 of this journal was subtitled “Beyond the Ego and the Id,” pages 473-563 being devoted to the presentation and discussion of an article, “The Mind as Conflict and Compromise Formation” in which I suggested that the idea that mental functioning is best understood in terms of separate structures, agencies, or systems is not in accord with the facts as we know them today. Psychoanalytic data, I maintained, speak against such a view of mental functioning and in favor of the view that the mind is best understood as a set of compromise formations arising from conflicts over the sexual and aggressive wishes of early childhood. The present paper is both a further elaboration of the view I suggested as preferable and a response to the objections raised to that view by various discussants of the original paper.
It is only the part of psychoanalytic theory that explains mental functioning in terms of structures or agencies that I have suggested is inadequate and should be replaced. The ideas of conflict and compromise formation, of defense, of the calamities of childhood, of the