Introduction

This volume, the seventh in the Workshop Series of the American Psychoanalytic Association, explores the concepts of conflict and compromise formation with unusual candor. Conflict is a topic from the bedrock of psychoanalysis. First discussed by Freud in Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1895), it soon became a signature of the psychoanalytic understanding of psychological disorder. It was later recognized, within psychoanalysis, as centrally important to the developmental process as well. Compromise formation was originally discussed by Freud in connection with symptom formation. The term has found a wider use in recent years. In particular, Charles Brenner has presented a widely respected view of psychoanalytic conflict and compromise formation that forms the conceptual background of the present discussion (Brenner, 1982).

The authors of the first six papers in this volume all utilize the concepts of conflict and compromise formation in their clinical work. Thus, these papers, the nucleus of the book, provide a concise presentation of the place of these concepts in psychoanalysis today.

The first three papers are predominantly theoretical in content: Dr. Arlow discusses the concept of conflict in relation to the complementary concepts of trauma and deficit; Dr. Boesky provides a challenging discussion of recent thinking about compromise formation; and Dr. Tyson gives a developmental perspective, outlining the developmental progression from the infant's early conflicts with his caretakers to the complexities of internalized conflict in the adult.

The next three papers by Drs. Mayer, Kafka, and Willick provide clinical material from analytic work with neurotic, characterological,