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would have been much easier for Freud to adhere to his original seduction-theory. Sexual abuse in the family environment was known but represented a deviation from the norm. The trauma model would have highlighted the difference between normality and pathology. By contrast, the drive model talks about the undeniable fact of one’s own archaic infantile conquest and death wishes, of the inescapability of one’s instinctual [drive] nature. Although Freud highlighted trauma as a crucial etiological factor throughout his work, this stress on internal factors may have contributed to the fact that theoretical discussions of psychoanalytic concepts “moved the traumatic causes in relation to the drive-related conflicts and the fixations of the libido to the brink ” (Bohleber 2000, p.802). Contemporary psychoanalytic theories of trauma take into consideration the type and intensity of the trauma, the psychological conditions of the person before the trauma took effect and, the reaction of close caregivers and the environment towards the victims of trauma. II. B. The Topographic Theory and the First Theory of Anxiety (1900-1920) As Freud proceeded with his self-analysis, he came to view conflicts as increasingly more internal. In his conceptualization of internal conflict, he replaced affects with instincts and postulated prohibitive forces as existing also within (Freud, 1900; Freud, 1905a,b). In the “Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), these conflicts are theorized as occurring between the structures of consciousness and the unconscious. This internal structuring of psychic conflict is first clearly in view in the Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which will officially inaugurate psychoanalysis. The theory of the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1900) defines all the parameters of conflict developmentally (Freud, 1905b) within the context of one’s initial object relations with mother, father and the parental couple, as well as with siblings. Here love and desire clash with hostility and murderousness, both of which conflict with familial and social reality. Internal conflicts were elaborated on and understood as occurring between sexual and ego- preservative instincts (Freud, 1910a; Freud, 1911a; Freud, 1914: Freud, 1915a, b, c). This period witnessed a crucial expansion in Freud’s thinking about conflict. In his “Formulation of the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (Freud, 1911) he described the developmental vicissitudes of the pleasure versus reality principles. The fundamental axis on which the distinction between them rests is the subject’s relation to pain. The pleasure principle is best understood as the hatred-of-pain principle, which seeks pleasure to push aside and obscure pain. To obscure pain, the mind will fantasize or hallucinate satisfaction where none exists. When the mind realizes that hallucinations do not create real satisfaction, it learns to accommodate reality, even if it includes pain: “It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavor to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was thus introduced; what was presented in the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real, even if it
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