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dissociation , which in Stern’s frame of reference is the unconscious insistence, for unconscious defensive reasons, on maintaining experience in its potential or unformulated state. Dissociation is the unconscious refusal to think, to make meaning. Hence, dissociated experience simply can’t conflict with any other part of mind because it has not yet attained the kind of symbolic form or realization in which in it could conflict. The conflict is present between the two people, not internal to either mind. The two minds are like the two parts of a cleanly broken plate: they fit together, but each partner has only one of the parts. In the resolution of an enactment, the external conflict becomes internal in the mind of one participant and that provokes a similar development in the other mind. Internal conflict comes about for the first time this way. And that is why conscious conflict is an achievement. Stern, Davies, and Bromberg place conflict within a model of multiple and shifting self states, where it is lived out in dissociated and discontinuous experiences, in ruptures in going- on-being. The apprehension of internal conflict, in a Brombergian treatment, is made possible by the creation of an interpersonal field in which the analysand can tolerate being seen by another person and can borrow or absorb that observational capacity. Awareness of conflict is an emergent feature of this kind of relational work, requiring the establishment of conditions of interpersonal safety such that dissociated material can be held in awareness. Davies’s attention to unconscious conflict is a nuanced attunement to shifting forms of identifications (partial and whole), played out in various permutations in the analytic relationship. One of her signature images is that of the kaleidoscope, suggesting the protean, changing experience of multiple identifications, as well as the subtle shifts introduced by the experience of conflict that lead to radical reorganizations. The conflict lies between such shifting states. Conflict in Aron’s (1996) conception of mutual meaning-making could arise from two sources: either the divided experiences of subjectivity that come from interaction and symbolization, or from experiences of recognition and solitude that arise in various interactions (Benjamin 1995, 1998; Slavin and Kriegman 1992). One type of acute conflict, from Aron’s perspective, is located in the interpersonal and intrapsychic realm of the analyst and analysand, and that is the conflict between the wish for recognition and the wish for distinctiveness, uniqueness, and separation. In fact, this is a conflict less of wishes than it is of relational transactions, a clash between paradigms of relatedness. Any theory of conflict must entail some theory of motivation (Harris 2005). One of the foundational theorists of the relational perspective, Greenberg (1991), feels the need to retain a concept of drive in order to talk about function. Mitchell’s (1997, 2000) work followed a trajectory similar to the Fairbairn’s model of relational conflict, moving on to Loewald’s interest in attachment and development. Mitchell’s view came to be that one is not drawn into, but rather is always already embedded in, interactive matrices. It is not, perhaps, that relationalists eschew drive theory, but instead one might say – in the spirit of Ghent (2002) – that they view drive as having a lowercase d . Ghent’s motivational
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