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is presaged by envisioning it as a special grade within the ego - the ego ideal (Freud, 1921), and by its being developmentally constituted as an heir to the Oedipus Conflict (1924b). The Signal Theory of Anxiety (Second theory of Anxiety), where Structural Conflict emerged in full color, came shortly after (Freud, 1926). Defense mechanisms were defined and located in the (unconscious portion of) Ego. In addition to the previously defined repression, reaction formation, regression, identification and projection, the concept of ‘disavowal’ comes to occupy increasingly prominent place (Freud 1923b, 1924b). Repression is admittedly but one of the defenses. Anxiety became the motive (trigger) for defense, not its result. Psychoneurotic symptoms were viewed as compromise formations rising out of the conflict between instincts and defense, with the participation of internalized moral prohibitions (Superego) and perceived external pressures. The structural conflict of this era is sometimes called the inter-systemic conflict , to differentiate it from the Hartmann’s later intra-systemic conflicts within the ego. Viewed developmentally, “the motives for repression were now conceptualized as succession of fears, quite convincing to the child, involving parental disapproval and punishment which, in the course of development, became internalized and subsumed under the influence of the moral agency known as superego, itself active in a largely unconscious mode” (Abend, 2007, p. 1420). Within the structural theory, Superego becomes an heir to the Oedipus complex. In this phase of theory development, ego emerges as the focus of clinical action. While holding firm in his focus on intrapsychic conflict, Freud writes in 1937: “…the business of the analysis is to secure the best possible psychological condition for the function of the ego; with that it has discharged its task” (Freud, 1937a, p. 250). The objective is to modify the analysand’s ego so it can better deal with instinctual demands, pressing for expression and satisfaction. The methodology of achieving insight through interpretative reconstruction and construction (Freud, 1937b) is further refined. The ego’s multiple roles as initiator of defenses, decision maker and executor of actions, synthesizer of conflicting elements in mental life, evaluator and negotiator of the conditions of the environment placed the ego at the center of analytic interest “so much so that the next phase of Freudian psychoanalytic theorizing became known as ego psychology” (Abend, 2007, p. 1420).
III. POST-FREUDIAN DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPE AND NORTH AMERICA
The conceptualization of conflict defines psychoanalytic theories after Freud. Two pathways diverged from Freud’s work that came into conflict in Great Britain and eventually in the United States: ego psychology and object relations, a fertile theoretical conflict in psychoanalysis that inspired many seminal future developments worldwide.
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