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As psychoanalytic thinking has evolved through the years, there has developed an increasing concern with the role of the environment as a co-determiner of personality and behavior, a trend perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Erikson. However, unlike those from the so-called “culturalist” and “interper-sonalist” schools, psychoanalysts like Erikson have taken pains to make it clear that a concern with environmental considerations should not mean a neglect or de-emphasis of biological and intrapsychic processes. Rather, according to what one can consider the contemporary psychoanalytic position, both biological and environmental variables are important in terms of their acting on and being mediated by intrapsychic processes.
This paper will concern itself with a particular class of environmental-intrapsychic interactions: those in which an external event evokes a psycho-pathological reaction. Under this heading I include both those events that precipitate the initial emergence of pathological expression and those that stimulate the reappearance or intensification of such expressions after they have first appeared.
Psychoanalytic theory views psychopathology as involving a response to and an expression of unconscious conflict. Our current understanding is that such pathology appears when an individual experiences a libidinal or aggressive drive as threatening. Unable to utilize a more expressive form of regulatory control, he attempts to ward off the drive by invoking one or more defensive operations. Sometimes these defenses are successful, and have no, or minimal, maladaptive consequences. On other occasions, they are unsuccessful in that drive derivatives or anxiety appear, or the more complex phenomena emerge that we call symptoms, the latter being viewed as compromise formations, expressing