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In every analysis three battles are being fought unconsciously by the patient: two of these inner fights have no connection with analysis, the third is artificially induced by the analytic procedure.
Battle No. I: The unconscious Ego's fight with and against the torturing inner conscience.
Battle No. II: The unconscious Ego's fight against the progress of the neurosis per se.
Battle No. III: Artificial intensification of the battle against neurosis in psychoanalysis through “mobilization of unconscious guilt”.
Let's scrutinize these three battlefronts and their inner interconnections.
Every analysis is confronted with a loser in the “battle of the conscience”. Were the patient capable of furnishing suitable defenses before his forum internum, we would never see the patient. To enter analysis, means automatically that an unsatiated portion of the inner guilt remains, with which the patient cannot cope. This does not exclude that the patient fought desperately. He did and lost. He is, moreover, not only a loser, but a bad loser: he complains no end.
A patient, a man in the late forties, aged in the last few years before analysis very considerably. This was visible more in his posture and general attitude, than clinically-diagnostically. The reason was an internal conflict, involving his wife and his “girl friend”. He played off both women against each other, without any tendency of solving the conflict. He was full of undigested inner passivity, and had as condition for enjoying sex the prerequisite of “the forbidden fruit”. To counteract his passivity, he had to establish the defense mechanism of pseudoaggression. Therefore—the necessity of the second woman. His infantile prerequisite of the forbidden, made legalized marital sex worthless for him—once more an attitude pushing him into the senseless extramarital affair. The