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Freud’s next period of thinking within the Topographic theory begins with “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). Here the aggressive drive was added to the sexual drive and conflict became conceptualized as instinctual drive vs. defense/repression (Freud, 1920). Defenses of varying types were associated with different stages of personality development. Anxiety continued to be viewed as resulting from repression (First theory of anxiety). Repression was mostly used as a synonym for defense. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” Freud (1920) introduces what he now considers to be the primary conflict in the mind, that between life and death, in the form of instincts that seek to renew life and instincts that seek to repeat the trauma, the conflict between the creation of high unities and the return to inorganic matter. In discussing the developmental twists and turns that his theory of instincts has undergone through the years Freud states clearly his fundamental perspective on conflict : “Our views have from the very first been dualistic…” (p. 53). Freud here also defines development as the result of conflict. In referring to the “instinct towards perfection” he tells us , “The phenomena that are attributed to it seem capable of explanation by these efforts of Eros taken in conjunction with the results of repression” (Freud, 1920, p. 43). The conflict between Eros and the repression of Eros creates the desire for improvement that increases the capacity for sublimation, pointed out by Freud already in his paper on Leonardo da Vinci (Freud, 1910), which inaugurated applied psychoanalysis. Towards the end of his life, Freud returns to this view and broadens its importance. He eventually sees the conflict between the life and death instincts as foundational for conceptualization of all human behavior and thinking : “Only by the concurrent or mutually opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death-instinct—, never by one or the other alone, can we explain the rich multiplicity of the phenomena of life ” (Freud, 1937, p. 243). II. C. The Structural Theory (Second Topographic Theory) (1923 – 1937) The next stage of theory development, known as the Structural Theory (also known outside of North American circles as the Second Topographic Theory), presented in 1923, was an exposition of the tripartite personality structure: Id, Ego, and Superego (Freud, 1923). This period of Freud’s theory opened the idea of conflict by situating the ego in a game of three- dimensional chess. In “The Ego and the Id” Freud (1923a) integrates all his ideas of conflict into a single system of great complexity. For here the ego must struggle with several conflicting relationships . Firstly, it must struggle with its conflict with the impulses of the id , which themselves are in conflict between the instincts of life and death . Secondly, the ego must navigate the conflict between these impulses and the external world . And thirdly, the ego, in its identification with its objects, creates another grade within itself, which Freud named the Superego , to house the now internalized objects. And thus, the ego has created another conflict between itself and its Superego. The complex nature of the Superego’s involvement in conflict
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