In this article, I suggest that one aspect of human personality structure is usefully understood as a dynamic balance or dialectic between dissociation and conflict and argue that psychoanalysis must continue to broaden its concepts of psychic structure, unconscious phenomena, and therapeutic action beyond the model provided by conflict theory. From a relational perspective, an analyst is not simply helping a patient change a unified though poorly adaptive self-representation to an equally unified more adaptive one, but is also negotiating with multiple self-representations, each in its own terms, and enabling the dissociative gaps among them to rebuild linkages through a perceptual process of meaning construction. The roles of enactment and interpretation are discussed in the context of trauma, dissociation, and the nature of reality.