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without fully rejecting conflict, these concerns have challenged the state of monopoly, which the concept of conflict has occupied in traditional theory. Conflict is no longer considered as important as it was in the past. What most influenced the decrease of its importance is the focus upon the role played by the real object over the construction of the psychic structure that has been damaged by a traumatic relationship resulting in deficits of function; this view is supported by a large amount of data on childhood trauma. For many contemporary psychoanalytic schools, the concept of conflict is not overly rejected but somehow marginalized and supplemented by the concept of deficit, thus widening the scope of psychopathological understanding and, accordingly, of clinical technique. Widening the scope of psychopathological understanding – that is conceiving psychic suffering not only as a consequence of conflict but also as organized around a damaged self-structure – results in a corresponding widening of classical psychoanalytic approach: while this is based on recognition of conflict, followed by interpretation and working through it, analytic strategies inspired by deficit issues aren’t intended at searching and unveiling repressed meanings, at overcoming resistance, but rather at assisting the ego in establishing meaning and in feeling that something has the quality of being (Killingmo 1989). In the different interpersonal, intersubjective, and relational perspectives developing in the past three decades, there has been significant attention paid to the presence and function of conflicts that may be intersubjective and inter-relational , internally and externally derived, and, in many instances, transgenerational. Relational theories find the potency of conflict in the individual’s encounter with the culture at many levels. Conflicts are likely to emerge as individuals are engaged by, become subject to, or resist, the cultural surround; particularly this becomes the case when the individual inhabits or is inhabited by any of the many forms of non-normative identities and personhoods (race, class, sexuality, disability, culture and gender). Contested forms of identification are at the forefront of many clinical concerns encountered with patients and are expressed in patient anguish and in difficulty in the transference-countertransference matrix. In his book “Relational Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration”, Mitchell (1988) elaborated on conflicts among different relational configurations, derived from conflictual experiences with significant others. Cautioning against simplification, he stated several years later in a “Commentary”: “… to portray my view of conflict as conflict between the person and other people in his or her environment is a bewildering misrepresentation. In fact, one of the central points in my 1988 book was to distinguish between relational theories centered on developmental arrests and relational-conflict theories… “ (Mitchell, 1995, p. 577). In the work of Dimen (2003), Layton (1998), Harris, (2005), Corbett (2001a, 2001b), and Goldner (2003), and others, conflict is always located inside and between systems, political and personal, social and psychic. From this perspective, influenced by postmodernism, feminism, and queer theory, there is an inherent conflict between regimes of surveillance and those supporting individuality and health, and between normativity and freedom. These contradictions, which in political theory are sometimes posed as structuring conflicts of class, ethnicity, culture or gender are often lived out in countertransference conflicts experienced by the analyst.
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