15 Toward a Pure Psychology of Inner Conflict

The centrality of inner conflict in human psychological life has been a fundamental tenet of Freudian psychoanalysis since its inception. In recent years, however, long-held assumptions about the nature and origins of conflict have increasingly become subject to critical reappraisal. Arguments put forth by a number of authors (Gill, 1976; Klein, 1976; Schafer, 1976; Stolorow, 1978) have persuasively demonstrated the extent to which the psychoanalytic understanding of conflict has been obstructed by classical metapsychology and, in particular, by the theory of instinctual drive. Proposals have been offered that would replace the mechanistic imagery of a mental apparatus disposing of drive energies with a psychology of conflict recast in the language of clashing personal purposes (Klein, 1976) and human actions (Schafer, 1976). It is the thesis of this chapter that from a psychoanalytic perspective conflict is to be viewed always and only as a subjective state of the individual person, and that it is the task of psychoanalytic inquiry to illuminate the specific contexts of meaning in which such conflicts take form. I am thus proposing a strictly hermeneutic approach to conflict, in line with Kohut's (1982) desire to reframe psychoanalysis as a pure psychology.

The frequently posed antithesis between conflict theory and Kohut's (1977) self psychology is, in my view, an artifact of the embeddedness of the traditional concept of conflict in classical metapsychology and drive theory. When conflict is freed from the encumbering image of an energy disposal apparatus and is pictured solely as a subjective state of the person, then the supposed antithesis between conflict theory and self psychology vanishes. When conflict is liberated from the doctrine of the primacy of instinctual drive, then the specific meaning-contexts that give rise to subjective states of conflict becomes an empirical question to be explored psychoanalytically. The focus of psychoanalytic inquiry then sh