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Every psychoanalyst agrees that conflict exists in all of us. Most analysts accept Freud's findings that mental health or illness is based, not on the content of particular conflicts, but on the degree of success or failure in coping with the conflicts to which everyone is subject. Thus, it is not conflict itself that is pathological, but difficulties and inadequacies in the means and resources available to the individual for conflict resolution.
However, this remarkable degree of agreement does not extend to how to define conflict, to what its origins are, to what it is that is in conflict, or, as clinicians, to what to do about it. The study of normal or expectable conflict in children can, I believe, illuminate these questions and inform our work with patients of any age.
A knowledge of how conflict begins, develops, and elaborates gives the therapist a perspective from which to understand the clinical problems of behavior and symptoms with which he or she is asked to help. But when and how does conflict begin? I will give an example from early in life, and then discuss what we currently know from the developmental timetable about when the elements necessary for the person to experience conflict appear.