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Structure is an imposing idea. It evokes steel and concrete. Even the sound of the word—its two syllables symmetric around a hard consonant core—suggests fixity, order, authority. Structure is an apt term for an earlier psychoanalytic era when a firm central core of authority gave shape to our theory, our language, and our institutions. We knew then—or so it appears today, looking back— what psychic structure was and what psychoanalysis was. Psychic structure was tripartite. Id, ego, and superego had a reality, in analytic discourse, almost closer to the reality of things than to the reality of abstract concepts. The solidity of these structural components and the complexity of their interconnections naturally suggested that only an intricate and lengthy procedure could be expected to have sufficient power and precision to alter them. That is, the unique authority of psychoanalysis was a logical correlate of the reification of psychic structure. Psychic structure had an objective existence, and psychoanalysis was the craft of altering it, by means of its specialized tool, the interpretation of unconscious mental contents.
Of course, psychoanalysis has never really been completely uniform, in its organization or its theory. From the beginning, it spawned schismatics. Yet today, we can hardly be certain which school is schismatic and which central. All agree that psychoanalysis seeks to change something that has a tendency to remain relatively constant in people. But analysts no longer concur about the nature of this constancy or the manner in which psychoanalysis alters it.