This edition of Sitegeist, the eleventh, brings together papers from The Site's recent Conference which took Conflict as its theme. The event, a vibrant, convivial and intellectually stimulating day, allowed a space for conflict to be discussed from a number of different perspectives—leaning on the social, the personal, the organisational, the political, the metapsychological—but always, necessarily, remaining in sight of the human condition. Conflict is an undeniable aspect of what it means to be human and by engaging in acts of thinking around conflict, the human condition itself is interrogated.
Conflict is at the heart of all the stories psychoanalysis wants to tell, not least in the myriad oppositional pairs which litter psychoanalytic literature. Formulations of the conscious and the unconscious might be thought of as a pivotal example of such a pair, but there are many more: the good and bad breast, the true and false self, the life and death drives, the animus and anima, self and other. What compromises need to be made in order for these potentially conflictual drives, objects and situations to be tolerated? How do we deal with conflict? What might happen when conflict can't be managed? How are we able to approach this foundational and fundamental notion?
Conflict lurks in the relentless struggle between what we want and what we're supposed to want, between what is allowed and what is forbidden to us, and in those struggles, we come to understand conflict as a constituent aspect of subjectivity, of what it means to be human. As Laplanche and Pontalis have observed, the conflict between desire and defence, between drives and agencies point to a battle between opposing wishes; the Oedipal conflict points to a battle between these wishes and the prohibitions imposed on them.
From his earliest work on hysteria, Freud insisted that the neurotic symptom emerges as a result of a compromise between two groups of ideas that are in conflict with one another, that is two ideas that share an immediacy, that exist in tandem with one another, amd which cannot
easily be separated. This leads Freud to say that mental conflict results in a flight into illness—as if illness was the place we go when we cannot choose, when conflict cannot be resolved.
As Ferenczi puts it in the 1920s—in a gloss on Freud's ideas regarding the conflicts of opposing desires—there would be no neurosis without conflict: if the conditions for conflict were absent, there would be no need to escape into illness. But is it possible that conflict could be eradicated? Freud is able to elaborate on this once he outlines the structure of id, ego, superego. He is now able to make the assessment that some illnesses emerge as a result of conflict between these three agencies: a narcissistic neurosis—Freud offers the example of melancholia—emerges as a result of a conflict between the ego and the superego, while a transference neurosis is a conflict between the ego and the id. In psychosis, Freud suggests, the ego finds itself in conflict with external reality.
Dorothée Bonnigal Katz's paper, ‘Confllict and Ego Ideals’, addresses the problems of conflict via this topographical model, focussing on the work the French psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache did on Freud's second topography, with particular attention on the concept of the ideal ego—the target of the self-love that is at the heart of infantile narcissism. Dorothée argues that the ideal ego as a primary narcissistic structure carries enormous weight in any discussion of psychic conflict, and examines her theory with examples from her own practice. She notes that Freud had no fully coherent metapsychological theory of conflict, which not only mirrors the structure of conflict itself, but also points to a fundamental incompatibility in theorising conflict.
But what of this external reality that Freud evokes? What of the conflicts that aren't psychical, that aren't internal? What might a contemporary psychoanalysis have to say about these types of conflicts? Is something repressed in conflicts that are not about the individual in an internal battle between opposing forces, but in organisations, governments—the global, the local? Is the narrative of these types of conflict one of intolerance? When neighbours turn, in times of war, against one another, when once peaceful communities destroy their own in the service of an ideology, tolerance swiftly turns into hatred and
prejudice.
Barry Watt's paper, ‘Rethinking Belonging Beyond the Community of One’, examines the psychoanalyst Francois Roustang's assertion that psychoanalytic associations foster social cohesion through mobilising the transference to produce discipleship to an association's leaders or overall orientation. This critique is examined by Barry who asks whether there can be another way of formulating Roustang's theories about how associations are subject to a double bind of either courting internecine warfare, or fostering discipleships. Can there be another way of thinking about psychoanalytic communities, a way of thinking that reformulates what belonging means in psychoanalysis?
When, in his majestic treatise on the structures of anxiety, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxieties, Freud refers to the Oedipal conflict as a “conflict of ambivalence”, he is drawing on Bleuler's formulation of the term sixteen years earlier. The simultaneous existence of contrary tendencies is a notion that is well enough understood, but it refers to a particular type of conflict that Laplanche and Pontalis understand as a non-dialectical opposition that would involve a yes and a no in a way that could not be transcended, a problem that cannot be solved—a choice that's not really a choice. The Rat Man case shows how this theory is particularly pertinent in any discussion around obsessional neurosis, for example. Think of him removing and replacing the stone on the road in a compulsive oscillation between love and hate.
To avoid the impossibilities of these ambivalent states, a number of defences might be employed, one of which is to flee the scene, to perform a disappearing act. The character of Melville's story, Bartleby the Scrivener, as evoked by Josh Cohen in his paper, ‘Giving Up Without a Fight’, responds to requests from his colleagues with a pithy ‘I would prefer not to’. The response is unequivocal, it is one of non-desire, a position of zero conflict—the Nirvana Principle that acts as a release from the daily torments of existence, an urge towards nothingness. Josh examines the idea that the wish for inertia predates conflict, and that the wish to sleep, to extinguish psychic conflict, may be older and stronger than the wish to dream, or sustain psychic conflict. Sleep in the sense of
daydreams and fantasies, operates like a pleasure lure, like Coleridge's pleasure dome, serving to mitigate, in a sense, against the intrusion of the Real. He asks: “what happens when we think of psychic conflict as conditioned by a more primary (and paradoxical) drive to a zero state. And what bearing might a consideration of this zero state have on the malaise of our ceaseless culture of permanent busyness and distraction?
In the final paper from our Conference, ‘Conflict and Difference’, Previn Karian attempts to understand how conflict might be provoked by difference itself. This is thought about in relation to Jung's typology, as detailed in his Psychological Types. The epistemic implications of Jung's text is read alongside the aesthetic implications of irony in Kierkegaard's key text, The Concept of Irony. Conflict as the site of emergent difference rather than annihilatory aggression is here explored as the holding frame of Jung's typology that creates what Previn thinks of as a psychoid space for individual and social life, deploying irony and the vicissitudes of language for its vibrant thriving.