You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This paper attempts to clarify the various meanings of "structure" and how they relate to each other. Levey reviews some of these meanings, starting with Rapaport's "enduring underlying determiners of behavior." He explores Freud's work from the topographic to the structural models. Hartmann's principles of primary and secondary autonomy were created when that author felt that conflict resolution alone "could not account for adaptive behavior." Levey cites a confusion between the internal representations formed by identification and other psychic systems, since "representations are doing the same conceptual work as id, ego and superego." To overcome this confusion, he takes the broader view that structure may be defined in different ways, depending on which theoretical viewpoint is being applied to a particular piece of behavior. For example, in an economic viewpoint, structure refers to those factors that limit or alter discharge. In a drive-defense model, structures are defenses. And in the tripartite model, "the structures are enduring motivations." Other viewpoints (adaptational, object relations) are cited. To bring reason to all this, Levey relies on the hierarchical model of Gedo and Goldberg. Here the behaviors ascend from the primitive reflex-arc model to the selfobject model. Once the self has been consolidated, structure "refers to enduring motives." This would include "cohesion maintaining" relationships followed by the motives of the tripartite model, in turn followed by structure seen as a "non-conflicted hierarchy of motives." Thus any behavior can be potentially understood as an expression of structures best seen from the vantage point of one or more of the above theoretical viewpoints. For example, a transference reaction can be viewed as a result of conflict within the tripartite structures, an expression of unconscious interactions between self- and object representations, or an instability of the self-representation expressed in a