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Because modern neuroscience has amassed evidence that associative, representational, and affective processes are all biological phenomena, one may now begin to view conflict as the learned association of a mental representation (of anything) and one or more of the several identificable dysphoric affects — for example, anxiety/fear, embarrassment/shame, sadness/depression, or disgust (Kandel, 1983, 1985; Reiser, 1984, 1985; Schwartz, 1987, 1988a, b 1990).
In this model of “conflict,” the fundamental units of human character disturbance consist significantly not of deficits but of representations associated too tightly with dysphoric feelings of often inappropriate intensity; this paradigm erases any fundamental conceptual distinction between, for example, “drive”-focused and narcissistic or “self”-related psychopathology: the registrations of either sexual excitement or the contours of one's face may, one can suggest, become linked with equal plausibility — and, very possibly, through similar neurophysiological mechanisms — with anxiety, shame, depression, or disgust.