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In Harris’ (2005) view, postmodern psychoanalysts are striving to realize a particular vision of paradox or conflict in which a number of distinct but interrelated self states can coexist—those of healer, psychoanalytic police officer, subject and object of theory, and one who is the subject of, and is subject to, particular cultures, subgroups, and families. From a number of theoretical perspectives, conflict (intersubjective, intrapsychic, and enacted) is attendant on the process of change itself. Conflict is an inherent aspect of developmental movement and such movements (macro or micro) are charged with powerful experiences of disequilibrium. Change itself is a potentially complex conflictual state: multidirectional and unstable. Conflicts that emerge in the conditions of psychic or relational transformations are produced by many different affect states and relational vertices. One central idea is that the person in conflict feels in the grips of two impossible ‘errands’ (Apprey, 2015). Growth will entail separation, and separation from dead or dying objects can feel intolerable. Change can be thought of as the moment when a conflict over psychic tasks and mental freedom creates a dangerous point of struggle or even impasse. Whether we call this the abyss or the edge of chaos, or a dramatic fear laden journey of separation, for some, perhaps in some way for all patients, this is a point of maximal conflict and danger. One can see this in the wax and wane of progress in analysis and the reversals and panics when psychic shifts begin or catch momentum. Willy and Madeleine Barangers’ (2006, 2009a,b) Field Theory concept of a spiral process and Bion’s (1965) notions of catastrophe and of transformation, present important roots for relational approaches. The catastrophe of change (Goldberg, 2008) and the forms of movement and psychic shift are both the site of mourning and the site of impasses in mourning. These ideas connect to a powerful set of concepts, which have been developed by J. Henri Rey. In his article “That which Patients Bring to Analysis” (Rey, 1988), Rey argues that patients may arrive in treatment with a hidden agenda – an errand as Apprey (2015) might say – which is to repair the damaged objects in their history now part of a dying or damaged internal world, in short: Heal the object (of internal fantasy) and then the patient can change. This is the impossible conflictual bind in which many treatments unfold. In the spirit of relational theorizing about the potent role of countertransference and the analyst’s subjectivity, one can turn Rey’s lens on the analyst’s unconscious task as well. Approaching the question of anxious resistance to change and the conflict-tinged determination to spoil growth, one must ask the same questions about the presence of such fears and conflicts in the analyst’s countertransference. Relational analysts have put a very strong focus on the instrumentality of countertransference and the powerful ways the analyst’s process disrupts and/or facilitates psychic change in the patient. Looking at relational writing with an eye to the place or function of conflict, it is important to note that other terminologies and other conceptual preoccupations fill the theoretical spaces where conflict might arise. Dimen (2003) and Hoffman (1998), for example, prefer the term dialectic . Both are interested in the productive tensions that appear under certain conditions of contradiction, primarily between analyst and analysand, but internally in either member of the dyad as well. It is important to stress that contradiction is not simply
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