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which object choice and the conditions of love are based on the latter. The aim of analytic treatment in the author’s view is to achieve a creative equilibrium between acknowledgement of castration and drive-preserving disavowal, a dialectic that is also the basis of a suggested theory of sublimation. The virtual object must be nurtured and metaphorically recreated in the analytic relationship. The dialectic of drive and object is also discussed in the context of sexuality and the transference. To avoid the danger of idealization of the object, the author contends that Oedipal sexuality must be allowed to unfold in the erotic transference, the analyst at times taking the place of the pre-oedipal object.
V. CONCLUSION
Owing to his creativity and insight, Freud changed his own theories of conflict over time. After his death, diversity and controversy intensified, as exemplified by the polemical debates in wartime England between the followers of Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. The complex post-Freudian psychoanalytic landscape of Europe reflected to some degree the situation of the British – with their Freudian, Kleinian and Independent traditions with their respective views on the centrality of conflict, admixed with the increasingly influential French perspectives. With the influx of prominent European analysts escaping the Nazis, particularly those close to Sigmund and Anna Freud, post-Freudian North American psychoanalysis was first systematized under the rubric of ego psychology, with its emphasis on inter-systemic and intra- systemic structural conflicts. By the 1970s, coincident with the death of Heinz Hartmann, the “Hartmann Era” was quietly becoming history, and the era of pluralism in theory and practice arrived. Across the continents, the growing influences of the British Object Relations theories of Klein, Bion and Winnicott; the French Lacanian and non-Lacanian perspectives, the synthesis of Freud with all the above in the work of the Latin American authors and the emergence of Kohut’s Self psychology, Relational and Intersubjective perspectives, together with the burgeoning of infant studies and advances in modern neuroscience, coincided with the ‘widening scope’ of psychoanalytic clinical practice, enriching psychoanalytic thought on conflict in many directions. There was a shift from the early focus on oedipal conflict, towards new formulations of (pre-oedipal) conflicts involving developmentally earliest identificatory-projective and introjective processes of internalized dyadic object relations, separation anxiety, object loss, loss of the love of the object, loss of identity and loss of reality, with pertaining earliest stages of building psychic structure through representation and symbolization. Old controversies (and conflicts) about the importance of trauma vs. unconscious conflict, together with the polarization of fantasy (phantasy) vs. reality, biological and constitutional endowment vs.
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