Back to Table of Contents
theoretical and clinical models have developed around four main issues (drive, ego, self and object relations), we could portray the role played by conflict in each of them. From the standpoint of the drive, the individual is seen in terms of the vicissitudes of urges, taking shape as desires that are embodied in actions and in conscious and unconscious fantasies, often experienced as unacceptable and dangerous. Therefore, psychic life is viewed as organized around conflict and its resolution and is signified by anxiety, guilt, shame, inhibition, symptom formation, and pathological character traits. The focus is on desire and urge, and defense against them. From the standpoint of the ego, the individual is seen in terms of capacities for adaptation, reality testing, and defense. Developmentally, the capacities for adaptation, reality testing, and defense develop over time as the result of the drive-conflict dynamic. From the standpoint of self-experience, the individual is seen in terms of the ongoing subjective state, particularly around issues of boundaries, differentiation of self from other, sense of separateness, self-esteem, the degree of wholeness/fragmentation, continuity/discontinuity. Conflict, here, is not as important in organizing psychic structure. From the standpoint of object relations, the individual is seen in terms of internal images based on childhood experiences, that is in terms of objects that come into play in any new experience. Conflict, in these approaches, concerns the intra-psychic as well the inter-psychic and inter-personal world of the subject. The validity of conflict versus deficit continued to be a controversy in the last decades of the 20 th century. The roots of this controversy go back to a specific interpretation of Hartmann’s concepts of ego autonomy and conflict free sphere. The Conflict theory view of this controversy explicated by Blum (1985) and Murray (1995) claims that throughout development the ego uses defense mechanisms as powerful, protective and adaptive tools in response to external, internal, real or imagined dangers. The excessive use of defenses can harm non-defensive personality functions. Defenses then can interfere with personality development, leading to constriction and pathological alterations of the ego. However, development proceeds with or without traumatic relational experiences. Freud’s statement about the ego making an adjustment under traumatic external conditions can be contemporarily restated in view of specific intra-systemic conflict within the ego . The conflict is between defensive and non- defensive functions (Papiasvili, 1995). The content of intrapsychic conflict scanned, uncovered, and analyzed by the psychoanalytic method ranges from pre-genital to Oedipal and post-Oedipal issues. With increasing clinical and theoretical knowledge over the years, all developmental levels are seen to be present and operative in all cases. Pathology of the self- representation within the ego is also variously involved. A specific conflictual activity revolving around the deficit was described by Axel Hoffer (1985) in his concept of Conflicts of Self-protection. This concept depicts specific intrapsychic conflicts that develop around efforts to hide ‘ego deficits’ and the fierce neediness that often accompanies them. “Feelings of shame and self-contempt are associated not only with the perceived ‘deficit’ itself, but also with the desperate, often vengeful efforts to obtain compensation for it…” (Hoffer, 1985, p. 773).
24
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online