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yes to all three in every case. One learns to ask instead: “What wishes of childhood origin are being gratified here?... What unpleasure (anxiety or depressive affect) are they arousing? What is a defensive aspect? What is the superego aspect?” (Brenner, in: Richards, Willick, 1986, p. 40). Building on Freud’s Principle of Overdeterminism and Waelder’s Principle of Multiple Function, Rangell restates the contemporary version, in line with Brenner and Arlow’s extended notions of conflict and compromise formation , as the Principle of Interchangeability of Psychic Elements: Psychic elements are engaged in conflictual interaction with each other and are synthesized in an overdetermined fashion into new psychic products which then secondarily participate in conflict activity. The complementary dynamism to synthesis is analysis, dissecting the psychic outcomes to their original component parts while tracing regressive pathways to the roots of conflict. In life, components of conflict are fused in a psychic outcome, which is often an aggregate cognitive-emotional state containing primary and secondary symptoms superimposed on previously achieved personality organization (Rangell, 1983; Papiasvili, 1995). Creative and integrative aspects of defense analysis are formulated by Rangell: “The road to healthy integration in analysis is differentiation and reintegration, by destratification of clinical aggregates and their resynthesis into more stable adaptive wholes…” (Rangell 1983, pp.161). This approach is further extended and refined by Gray (1994) in his ‘close process monitoring’ analysis of defensive aspects of transference. Rangell (1963, 1967, 1985) revisited the question of signal anxiety versus affect as a trigger for defense in a conflict sequence. He studied microscopic processes before, during, and after the defense was triggered, preceding any psychic outcome, and concluded that no matter what the nature of an unpleasurable affect participating in the conflict, the immediate signal for the use of defense is anxiety. Rangell describes an “ intrapsychic process ,” an unconscious cognitive-affective sequence of impulse-anxiety-defense-psychic outcome while maintaining that anxiety continues as a trigger and motive for defense behind all other states of unpleasure. The anxiety is about unpleasure overwhelming the ego. Rangell surmises an unconscious decision making function within the ego, which ultimately shapes the specific psychic outcome. Through interaction with self and object representations, intrapsychic trial actions, representative of an intrasystemic choice conflict within the ego, occur. Objects are assessed for intended discharge. The self is assessed for a feeling of anxiety signaling danger, or safety and mastery. The ubiquitous background activity, described by Rangell (1963) as an ongoing microscopic conflict series and internal trial actions, may be studied from the point of view of unconscious fantasy. Arlow places unconscious fantasy and unconscious fantasy function at the center of an investigation of intrapsychic conflict. While Freud viewed unconscious fantasy as a derivative of an unconscious wish, Arlow sees it as a compromise formation that contains all components of structural conflict. Just as Rangell stressed the ongoing ubiquitous character of microscopic conflict processes and trial actions, Arlow (1969) stresses the persistent influence that unconscious fantasies have on every aspect of an individual’s functioning,
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