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disagreement or difference; rather, through various interactions, intrapsychic conflict can be triggered and developed, and vice versa. Intrapsychic conflict can produce external conflicts that are lived out interpersonally. For Hoffman (1998), the fundamental source of conflict is neither sex nor aggression, but rather our deeply conflictual relation to mortality. Yet in one striking analogy, conflict – internal to the analyst, at the outset – between “working by the book” and working spontaneously is compared to the conflict experienced by the child between Oedipal rival and love object. This analogy suggests how inevitably indebted any analyst is to the view of the centrality of sex and aggression to conflict, although these conflicts erupt in shifting states of affect (Spezzano 1998), intersubjective space (Benjamin 1995, 1998) or relational constellations (Davies 1998, 2001). Benjamin (1998) argues for a fluid, shifting focus on the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, in which motivation exists on both an interpersonal level and in the service of relatedness and narcissistic needs. If there is a dual theory here, it is object relational/relational. The preference for a term like dialectic is more than rhetorical. For Hoffman and Dimen, dialectic captures the dialogic, active, and interactive aspects of the protean character of conflictual experience. Dialectics offers the sense of a dialogue among alternatives , a registry of multiple voices, whether choral, harmonic, atonal or of the call-and-response type. For Dimen, the form and function of conflictual life within the realm of sexuality attests to fecundity, surprise, excess, and irreducible trouble. On the other hand, conflict is relegated to a footnote in Stern’s (1997) book, where the author explains that the absence of explicit use of the term conflict signals its use as a background supposition of less formal interest than the shifting states of psychic experience. This is quite like the use to which Bromberg (1998) and Davies (1998, 2001) put the term. Conflict, for Bromberg, usually appears in the context of dissociation (see Smith 2000a, for a discussion of the intersection of, and differences between, dissociation and conflict in Bromberg’s work). Bromberg’s working model stresses the expansion of the experiential relational field so that conflict becomes discernible. Stern’s view is that conflict is an achievement because it heralds the moment when Non-self becomes self. And once conflict is possible about material that had been dissociated, a process of negotiation can take place between the newly minted self-state and other self-states. What had been unthinkable can now be thought and felt, and what to do about it can be considered. Prior to this when that material was dissociated, it could neither be thought nor felt and so what to do about it could not even arise as a question. In subsequent publications, particularly in the article “The eye sees itself” from 2004, Stern laid out the idea that from a dissociation-based theory of mind, conflict is an achievement, not inevitability. However, from this perspective, unconscious conflict is deemed impossible. With the unconscious as unformulated, there is nothing with enough structure in the unconscious to conflict with something else. From this point of view, also the notion of unconscious fantasy/phantasy may need revision if it applies to anything unconscious and structured at the same time. If the unconscious is unformulated, unconscious meaning is not a form or a structure, but a potentiality – what might become conscious experience. The idea is connected with
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