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The whole phenomenon of the multiple function and of the multiple meaning of each psychic act, then, is not—in analogy to the older neurology—to be understood through any sort of conception of a summation of stimuli and threshold values, but—parallel to the concepts of newer neurology and biology—is to be understood as the expression of the collective function of the total organism …. The organism always reacts in its entirety. [Waelder 1936, pp. 81-82]1
Freud's theory of the mind gave psychoanalysts a way of looking at patients as both single persons and warring collectives all at once. Among the conflicting “elements” inside people were, first, consciousness and unconsciousness, and later, id, ego, and superego. But since these were reflections of a single person, they had no sharp boundaries (and what is a boundary if it isn't sharp?). Fantasies floated over the whole topography. Ego and id were only vaguely distinguished (as Freud emphasized in 1937, and as was discussed by Gill [1963] and Schur [1966]; see also Friedman 1973). And the superego seems a really separate thing only when mistaken for the conscience of common parlance.
Practicing analysts, searching for a handy conflict to separate one item from another, naturally preferred the internally negotiating