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which, aside from a brief mention of conflict between parent and child over differing self- object needs, the notion of conflict recedes into the background. How one thinks about conflict is one of the defining factors of both, Freud’s theoretical development as well as the development of psychoanalytic theories after Freud.
II. STAGES IN THEORY DEVELOPMENT: FREUD
Tracking the variations in how Freud conceptualized conflict defines several periods of his theoretical development. The unique way three different psychopathologies try to organize their conflicts is symptomatic. Hysterics convert the struggle between sexuality and society into physical symptoms creating a conflict between the mind and the body. Obsessional individuals displace the struggle between an idea and its affect into a seemingly innocuous obsession. Paranoid patients project their incompatible experiences into the outside world creating a conflict between the internal and external world. These unique ways of inadequately resolving psychic conflicts became gradually structured in stages of theory development. II. A. Trauma and The Pre-Analytic Cathartic Period (1893 – 1899) During this time, Freud speaks of conflicts between affects associated with traumatic events and the moral prohibitions of the society, designating internal-external, interpersonal conflict, where the notion of inner opposing forces is implied (Freud, 1893 - 1895). In 1899, comparing dreams and hysterical symptoms, Freud reminisces on his 1894 statement of conflict: “It is not only dreams that are wish fulfillment, but hysterical attacks as well…I recognized it long ago… Reality – wish-fulfillment. It is from this pair of opposites that our mental life springs” (Freud, 1899, p. 278). In his early work with hysterics Freud discovered that their sexual desires conflicted with societal norms and that the pathological resolution of this conflict was the symptom. Symptoms are generated as inadequate ways to resolve conflicts: “… patients … had enjoyed good mental health up to the moment at which an occurrence of incompatibility took place in their ideational life … until their ego was faced with an experience, an idea or a feeling which aroused such a distressing affect that the subject decided to forget about it because he had no confidence in his power to resolve the contradiction between that incompatible idea and his ego by means of thought-activity…” (1894a, p. 47, original emphasis). Inspired by Josef Breuer’s experiences with Anna O. and Charcot’s demonstrations of post-traumatic hysterical paralyses as well as the experimental production of hysterical paralyses and its reversal by hypnotic suggestion, Freud and Breuer assumed (Freud and Breuer 1895) that, in Conversion Hysteria, specific mental circumstances emerged, in which violent,
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