Chapter 6. Summary

Thus we seem to have at least three areas of the mind, each of them characterized, as first proposed by Rickman (1951), by a number. One might equally designate these three areas as spaces, spheres, fields, levels, localities, or instances, and perhaps by other terms as well. All of these terms have their own clusters of associations, and I, for one, am rather wary of tying myself down to any one of them as the most suitable. For the time being I prefer to use either ‘area’ or ‘level’, but I must admit I am not myself clear why I prefer these two.

The most widely known among these three areas is characterized by the number 3, and may be called the area of the Oedipus conflict. This is rightly described as the nuclear complex, for all human development — individual or collective — must pass through it and will then bear for ever the imprint of the solution that the individual or the civilization in question has found in its struggle with the conflicts involved. The whole area is characterized by the fact that everything that happens in it involves in addition to the subject at least two parallel objects. The force operating at this level has the form of a conflict originating, as a rule, from the ambivalence created by the complexities of the relationship between the individual and his two parallel objects.

This level is the one of which we know most. There are two main reasons for it. One is that the relationship between the subject and his objects is very similar to that of an adult's, and the second that adult language is a fairly adequate means of describing what can be observed.

The second area, as I have tried to show in this Part, is profoundly different from the previous one. It is the area of the basic fault, characterized by the number 2, which means that in it two, and only two, people are involved. Their relationship, however, is not that obtaining between two adults; it is more primitive. A further