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There is no question that the edited volume, Psychoanaltyic Perspectives on Conflict, is both a noble and a necessary endeavor. By articulating different perspectives around a single, central concept, it touches every essential controversy that has divided the different schools of psychoanalysis. One can easily imagine it being published in hard cover, as it is truly a reference work and not, incidentally, an easy read.
Far too often, perhaps in deference to their roots or in imitation of Freud, analysts of various persuasions use the same word when referring to vastly dissimilar entities. The true disparities of their positions go unexplained; as a field we believe we are talking to each other, while our internal representations of a concept are rather disparate. As Ellman (2010) noted, while in the original Tower of Babel people could not communicate because they spoke many different languages, in our psychoanalytic Tower of Babel, we all use the same words, but are talking about something different. The book endeavors to address this problem by bringing it to the fore. Collected together, each of the eminent authors explains how conflict works, or how it is defined in their particular corner of the psychoanalytic universe. Two final chapters examine the evidence for a neural basis for concepts such as repression and the repetition compulsion that are seen as underlying conflict, as well as experimental evidence for the unconscious and conflict found through examining implicit attitudes in the lab. Despite the excellence of individual chapters, particularly those on lesser read theorists such as Fairbairn and Laplanche, the reader may end up (as this one did) feeling even more confused about what conflict means than before an arduous read. The book helps to expose the “narcissism of small differences” that often hampers efforts at integration. This is most clear in the chapters that ignore the object relations perspectives nascent in Freud, vilifying drive theory i