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.
Ithank Wachtel and DeMichele for their friendly discussion of my paper and for the interesting questions they raise. Their questions give me an opportunity to expand my ideas. I'll begin with their peripheral concerns and move toward their central concern—namely, their reservations about the plan concept. I'll also return to a discussion of Mrs. C.
As Wachtel and DeMichele point out, my perspective has been shaped by Freud's revision of the theory of anxiety in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety” (1926). Freud's revision of this theory changed the psychoanalytic concept of psychic conflict. Freud (1926) assumed such conflict is between a wish and a fear. A patient is afraid to pursue a particular goal because she unconsciously assumes that doing so is dangerous. In childhood, she perceived the danger as real and external. Later, she internalized it as a belief. Consider Freud's paradigmatic example. A male patient in childhood experienced as real and external the danger that he would be castrated for his sexuality, and so he became frightened of his sexuality and impeded in his pursuit of sexual goals. Subsequently, he internalized this danger by developing a belief in castration as a punishment. (Freud almost always wrote about castration anxiety as stemming from a belief and not from a fantasy.) Henceforth, the patient's conflict was internalized. He continued to pursue sexual goals and continued to be impeded in this pursuit by anxiety stemming from the belief in castration.
Freud's (1926) revision of theory paved the way for Alexander's conception of the corrective emotional experience (Alexander and French, 1946). If repression and hence psychopathology are held in place by a belief derived from experience, then new experiences that run counter to the belief may help the patient change the belief and so prove to be corrective.