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Conflict Theory. Modern conflict theorists depart from Freud’s structural theory in order to focus on compromise formations between drive derivatives, anxieties, defenses and superego pressures. Compromise is the outcome of a conflict. Compromises, like conflicts, are everywhere, since every part of the mind is conceived as structured around a compromise formation: namely around a conflict. For modern conflict theorists, mental development is conceived more as a sequence of compromise formations than as the classical Freud’s tripartite structure (id, ego, superego). The aim of psychoanalytic cure is to help the patient to acknowledge his unconscious conflicts and to have insight into how he defends against drive derivatives based on unconscious fears dating back to childhood. The analyst’s task is to structure a psychoanalytic situation that will facilitate the emergence of unconscious conflict and defense in as clear a manner as possible and to interpret this unconscious material to the patient in order to help him attain more adaptive compromise formations (Abend 2005, 2007; Arlow 1963; Brenner 1982, 2002; Druck et al 2011; Ellman et al 1998). Ego Psychology was initially most closely associated with Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann, and his collaborators Ernst Kris, David Rapaport, Erik Erikson, and Rudolf Lowenstein. Many others made important contributions, with technical impact and influence on later theory. These include R. Waelder, O. Fenichel, E. Jacobson, M. Mahler, H. Nunberg, J. Arlow, C. Brenner, L. Rangell, H. Blum, and others. Ego Psychologists’ unwavering interest in conflict was summed up by Jacob Arlow (1987), who, paraphrasing remarks of Anna Freud, Ernst Kris (1950) and Heinz Hartmannn (1939) wrote: “Psychoanalysis may be defined as human nature seen from the viewpoint of conflict” (p.70). In his review of the Ego Psychology and Contemporary Structural Theory, Blum (1998) observed that Ego Psychology was “a misnomer for a structural theory and therefore a literal, encapsulated ‘ego psychology’ does not exist…” (Blum, 1998, p. 31). Ego psychology, reacting against Id psychology, emphasized attention to the psychic surface, as a derivative of and indicative of the deeper unconscious conflicts. This was associated with renewed interest in the preconscious and in the manifest content of fantasies, dreams and screen memories. Interpretation was considered a sequentially ordered process. The interpretive sequence from the surface to depth and ‘defense before content,’ highlighting the resistance component of patients’ communications, presented an incremental analysis of extended length in the post-World War II era. The theoretical underpinning was the structural theory which considered the psychic apparatus from the point of view of the conflict between id, ego, and superego, with the ego mediating between the other two agencies and reality, and gradually incorporating genetic, developmental and adaptive considerations. III. Ba. Anna Freud Anna Freud elaborated defense processes in the genesis of conflict. While in 1926 it was clear that conflict had two dimensions - defended content and defense processes - Freud had concentrated relatively more on defended content. Anna Freud, in her seminal publication, “The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense”, elevated defense processes to an equal status with defended content in the genesis of conflict (Freud, A, 1936).
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