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November 17, 1969. MANIFEST AGGRESSION AND MENTAL STRUCTURE. Theodore Lipin, M.D.
Dr. Lipin began with aggression as a basic biologic attribute of living organisms. It profoundly affects the process of analysis. It is difficult to 'detect, delineate
and dissect' aggressive actions that are channeled into the confines of the person's own mind and body. Psychological patterns of aggressive and libidinal activity are of two kinds. In one type, displacement, condensation, and regression of the energy charge readily occur. These activity patterns with readily transferable energy seek out and use the pleasurable aspects of a situation and avoid the unpleasurable. In the other type of activity pattern, energy is fixed and resistant to transfer. These different activity patterns are typical of certain phases of organization. In the repetition compulsion, energy charges are relatively noninterchangeable and unmodifiable. When they are energized they acquire a quality of compelling impulsion that is unaffected by considerations of pleasure and unpleasure.
Freud's discovery of the repetition compulsion was the first clinically detectable indication of instinctual drive representatives that are highly resistant to the transfer of the energy by displacement, condensation, or regression. Drive representatives of this class bind their energy strongly and consequently have the necessary stability to produce accurate and detailed reproductions of the traumatizing experience. The aggression inherent in the repetition compulsion 'may be a facet of a biologically innate, reparative process of almost the same intensity as the growth process'.
In some analysands we can observe defects of mental structure that result from the transfer-resistant patterns of aggressive activity isolated from the integrated part of the mind, thus causing excessive quantities of the freely mobile form of aggression to be discharged. They also cause such defects in mental structure as 'excessive l