I am grateful to Dr. Boesky for his thorough and penetrating discussion. He has raised a number of points to which I shall try to reply later. The one I shall start with is, I think, the most important and the most central to the topic under discussion.
Dr. Boesky argues forcefully for the retention of the concepts ego, superego, and id as "functional and developmental groupings of three major types" because the concept of three such agencies gives us "a better longitudinal view . . . of the components of conflict." If I understand him correctly, Dr. Boesky agrees that when one is discussing a particular patient's conflicts, that is, in the course of day-to-day clinical work, one thinks and talks about drive derivatives, unpleasure, defenses, and compromise formation and not about id, ego, and superego. But, he maintains, to understand and talk about the genesis of current conflict, to relate the present to the past in an intelligible way, one needs the idea of three functionally distinguishable agencies.
My response to this assertion is to ask for an illustration. I myself cannot think of one from my own clinical experience. An understanding of the developmental vicissitudes of conflict and compromise formation do not seem to me to require the assumption of functionally distinguishable agencies of or within the mind.
I would add the following. If the three mental agencies are distinguishable "functional . . . groupings," it should be possible to specify the basis on which they are to be distinguished. Can Dr. Boesky tell us which functional or developmental criteria characterize the id and which the ego? I don't see the justification for calling id and ego distinguishable mental agencies unless id is to be defined as something more than or other than the sum of sexual and aggressive wishes and ego as something more or other than the sum of unpleasure associated with those wishes and of the defenses that serve to minimize that unpleasure. To repeat, conflict between wish and defense can be described and understood without reference to mental agencies. As I tried to explain in my paper, one has to go beyond the clinical data of pathogenic conflicts, as Freud did in defining ego and id, if one is to justify a theory of agencies as opposed to a theory based on the operation of the pleasure-unpleasure principle.
I know from experience how similar Dr. Boesky's ideas and my own are when it comes to actual clinical work. I suspect that we are not all that far apart when it comes to matters of theory, too. I know that I myself was reluctant to consider seriously the advisability of giving up the concepts of id, ego, and superego. It took me ten years to bring myself to the point of doing so. So when Dr. Boesky and others want to retain concepts that are so familiar and that have seemed to be so useful in the past, I can sympathize with their desire. I can only add: Think seriously about what I propose. I believe that in the end you'll agree with me.
So much for the main point. What follow are responses to a few of Dr. Boesky's remarks that, though less central to our main subject, nevertheless deserve comment. Dr. Boesky suggested that there may be logical inconsistencies in my suggested revisions. For example, he said:
I wonder if there is not . . . a confusion in levels of abstraction. . . . [O]ne cannot speak of the mind of a person in conflict with his own drive derivatives because it would entail confusing supraordinate and subordinate functional organizations. Yet if the person replaces the ego [as Brenner suggests] that seems to be the consequence. If our old structural theory left us with an ego that was a homunculus, do the new proposals shrivel a person into one part of the mind? [pp. 516-517].
I confess that I don't see what the logical difficulty is to which Dr. Boesky refers. Cannot a person both wish for and fear something at the same time? Does the idea that one can do so involve a confusion in levels of abstraction? It doesn't seem to me that it does. Nor do I agree that there must be, as Dr. Boesky implied elsewhere in his discussion, a "part of the mind [that] . . . does the compromising," that if there is to be "a vast orchestra of compromise formations" there must be a "conductor," that is, an ego. To just say that there must be an ego without explaining why is to beg the question, I think.
At one point Dr. Boesky seemed to attribute to me the argument that, since there is no special part of the mind used only for defense, why not discard the mechanisms of defense? I hope my impression was wrong. As I am sure he knows, what I suggested in connection with the concept of defense mechanisms was that the term is a misleading one, since there are in fact no mental mechanisms that are reserved exclusively for defense (Brenner, 1982, chapter 5). Any aspect of mental functioning can be and at times is used defensively and can be and at times is used in the service of the gratification of a drive derivative. Similarly, I hope I have never spoken of "the affects of pleasure and unpleasure. . . ." My own definition of an affect is that it combines sensations of pleasure and unpleasure with an ideational content. Ideation is as much part of affect, in my view, as are pleasure and unpleasure sensations. But regardless of how one defines an affect, why is the idea that human beings, in their mental functioning, seek pleasure and avoid unpleasure "on a different level of abstraction than [are] compromise formations"?
Toward the end of his discussion Dr. Boesky refers to me as a "theoretic minimalist," an interesting term that I think was coined by Schafer (1988). In this connection he referred to my having asserted that "resistance is only another term for the transference," and should therefore be discarded. I cannot imagine what I said that gave that impression. Whatever the way in which one defines resistance, and there are several possible ways, as Dr. Boesky has made so clear (Boesky, 1983), I would never consider it to be synonymous with transference.
In his conclusion Dr. Boesky observed that "[t]he tension between comparisons and distinctions is a vital part of any scientific enterprise" (p. 522). I thoroughly agree with that statement as a generalization, but I don't think the example Dr. Boesky gave is a good illustration of its correctness. To quote Dr. Boesky again,
Brenner has said that the term phobia is not useful because it is essentially a compromise formation no different in its dynamic structure than other symptoms except for the one common element in all phobias of the use of avoidance. . . . But it is precisely the element of avoidance which it is useful to highlight. The element of avoidance allows us to see that the phobias as a group entail externalization and alloplastic implications when compared to obsessional symptoms. This realization has implications for a better future understanding of the phobias [p. 521].
The trouble with the illustration is that "the phobias" are not a diagnostic group. What I argued against was asserting that they are (Brenner, 1982, pp. 157-159). One sees symptoms of phobic avoidance in all sorts of patients, including psychotic ones. Phobia is not a useful diagnostic category, because all it tells one is that, as part of her or his symptomatology, a patient makes use of avoidance. It doesn't differentiate one class or group of patients from all others in a useful or etiologically important way. If what you want to study is defense, then it's useful to study avoidance (i.e., phobias), as they appear in all sorts of patients. If what you want to study is classes or categories of mental illness, you're not going to find it useful, I think, to focus your attention on phobias.
To return to the main point. If I understand him correctly, Dr. Boesky and I are in agreement that in day-to-day clinical work we don't need or use the concept that mental functioning is best understood in terms of id, ego, and superego, that is, in terms of three distinguishable agencies of the mind. Where we differ is that he thinks that the concept of distinguishable agencies is supported by the facts of mental development as we know them today and that it is this concept that best helps us to understand what we know about mental development. For that reason, he maintains, we should retain the concept of distinguishable agencies as part of psychoanalytic theory.
I have tried, both in my original paper and in my response to Dr. Boesky's discussion, to show why I differ on this point and why I think the weight of the evidence at present is on the side of giving up the concept of distinguishable mental agencies. I suggest that one can explain the facts of mental development and mental functioning as we know them today more accurately and more usefully if one drops the concepts of id, ego, and superego and thinks instead in terms of the pleasure-unpleasure principle, the components of conflict, and the resulting compromise formations. That is the approach that Dr. Boesky agrees guides his clinical work, as it does that of many others. Perhaps it is the best basis not only for practice, but for modern conflict theory as well.
Boesky, D. (1983), Resistance and character theory: The concept of character resistance. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 31(Suppl.):227-246.
Brenner, C. (1982), The Mind in Conflict. New York: International Universities Press.
Schafer, R. (1988), Discussion of panel presentations on psychic structure. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 36(Suppl.):295-312.
