Dr. Kramer is a Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Let me start by saying that I like Dr. Brenner's paper. I will discuss the reasons in a moment or two, but first I must thank him for absolving me from a little bit of professional guilt that I didn't know I had until I read his paper. Having come from a psychologically remote area of Brooklyn, and having attended a high school which emphasized the physical sciences, I had never heard of Sigmund Freud until I arrived at the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. There, I was initiated into coffeeshop psychoanalysis. I met up with the bubbling, volcanic id; the brooding, reproachful superego; the sunny, clear-eyed ego--each with its own theme like the characters in Peter and the Wolf. Little did I know that I was learning about the structural theory. And little did I realize that forty years later I would be discussing the retirement of that famous trio.
I continued to read in Freud and about Freud throughout medical school and residency--the easy stuff, naturally--the clinical papers, the famous cases, the papers in applied analysis. It all seemed so lucid, so intuitively right. It was clear to me even then that much of Freud's appeal came not only from the brilliance of his insights, but from his powers of description, and economies of style.
Naturally, when I began my analytic training I threw myself into a more serious study of Freud's writings. In this more systematic approach I was no longer able to put off the tough stuff--the metapsychological papers--high psychoanalytic theory. I must admit that, despite assiduous work and strong motivation, there were many portions of this important group of papers that I did not understand--a sign I took as a bad omen for someone who intended to become expert in the field. Take this passage--still showing the question-marks in the margin of my old copy of volume 4 of the Collected Papers. It is from the paper on "The Unconscious" (1915), part 6, in which Freud is trying to describe what he calls the communications between the two systems:
Co-operation between a preconscious and an unconscious impulse, even when the latter is subject to very strong repression, may be established if the situation permits of the unconscious impulse operating in harmony with one of the controlling tendencies. The repression is removed for the occasion, the repressed activity being admitted as a reinforcement of the one intended by the ego [pp. 194-195].
Here the term ego is not the same as the one he will define eight years later in "The Ego and the Id" (1923), but a term not quite defined in this paper. Here are another couple of sentences from the passage.
In respect of this single constellation the unconscious becomes ego-syntonic, falls into line with the ego, without any change taking place in the repression otherwise. The effect of the Ucs in this co-operation is unmistakable; the reinforced tendencies reveal themselves as, in spite of all, different from the normal--they make possible achievements of special perfection, and they manifest a resistance in the face of opposition similar to that of obsessional symptoms [p. 195].
I can quote passages from "The Ego and the Id," highly relevant to Dr. Brenner's paper, which are not quite so murky, but which also evoked some degree of confusion and doubt in this reader. It is not that one can't understand such passages at all; rather, they are like images that are out of focus. One can see the general configuration but none of the important details.
My teachers seemed, at least to me, aloof from the issue of clarity. This was, of course, during what Jack Arlow has called the apostolic epoch of psychoanalysis: the period, perhaps a little too worshipful, when all Freudian text was treated equally, as though everything Freud had written was equally valid, equally useful. Alas, my pleas for clarification were met with looks of concern and pity, as though I were benighted, or acting out some transference phenomenon against my poor analyst. The attitude of my teachers suggested that they understood what I could not, and that with more insight into myself, and more experience under my belt, my confusion would evaporate.
Then one day I read Arlow and Brenner's monograph Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory (1964), which demonstrates and argues in a closely reasoned way that the structural theory was more consonant with clinical data and modern psychoanalytic practice than Freud's earlier formulations of the mind. It is hard to describe the sense of liberation I experienced when I finished their monograph. Now, I was not alone in my theoretical doubts and confusion. Here was an intelligent analysis of the theory which underlay all of those obscure passages which concluded that there was much to be gained by viewing these early theories as necessary for their time but having no place in modern psychoanalysis. I was free at last. My cognitive guilt and shame had been absolved, and all of those nagging self-doubts about my skills as a student of psychoanalysis were laid to rest. My story is, of course, somewhat exaggerated. But it does reflect some truths which are relevant to Dr. Brenner's paper. First, the half-life of psychoanalytic knowledge is very long. Perhaps not as long as that of uranium, but long, perhaps too long. Seventy years is a long time for a theory in modern science to go unchallenged. Why this has been so is an interesting question--even Freud himself revised his theories of the mind every twenty years or so--but this is neither the time nor the place to answer it.
It is relevant in this context, I believe, to say a word or two about Freud's struggles over his contrary inclinations between empiricism and speculation. Despite his strong devotion to the empiricism of Bricke and Breuer, his early professional models, and his later disavowals of philosophy as playing an important part in his psychoanalytic work, his biographers document clearly enough a strong penchant for speculation which was deeply rooted in his ambitions and narcissistic fantasies. Gay (1988) states that Freud's "self-appraisals--in letters, confessional scientific papers, and recorded conversations--echo with a certain fear of losing himself in a morass of speculation. . . ."
Gay goes on:
Freud liked to portray his medical career as a vast detour starting from an adolescent's passion for profound philosophical conundrums and ending with an old man's return to fundamental speculations after a long, unwanted exile among the doctors. In reality, "philosophical" questions were never far from his awareness, even after, in his drastic words, he had "become a therapist against my will." Looking back to his youth when he was forty, he told Fliess in 1896, "I knew no longing other than that for philosophical insight, and I am now in the process of fulfilling it, as I steer from medicine over to psychology." He could empathize with his friend in Berlin, who seemed to be going in the same direction. "I see," he wrote in a reflective New Year's letter on January 1, 1896, "how you, through the detour of being a physician, are reaching your first ideal, to understand human beings as a physiologist, just as I most secretly nourish the hope of reaching my original goal, philosophy." However powerful his contempt for most philosophers and for their futile word games, he would pursue his own philosophical goals all his life [p. 118].
Gay cites an example of Freud's struggle with uncontrolled speculation during the period in which he was composing his metapsychological papers--1915.
[I]n some obscure way, something was going wrong with his book. . . . No doubt, Freud found stepping back from clinical detail . . . a hazardous enterprise. It reawakened his urge for untrammeled flights of thought; he found it virtually impossible to tame his lust for speculation. In April, after completing the paper on repression, he defined his writing . . . as "the succession of boldly playing imagination and ruthlessly realistic criticism." But as spring went on, he silenced the criticism and gave his imagination free rein. In July he sent Ferenczi a draft of what he called a "phylogenetic fantasy," a fantasy carrying further the imaginative conjectures he had first rehearsed in Totem and Taboo. This was the twelfth and last of the metapsychological papers. It was nothing less than an attempt to show that modern desires and anxieties, passed on through the ages, are grounded in the childhood of humanity. One particularly sweeping implication of this Lamarckian fantasy was embodied in Freud's proposal to plot the succession of neuroses onto a corresponding . . . prehistorical sequence. He was speculating that the relative ages at which moderns acquire their neuroses might recapitulate the course of events in the distant human past. Thus anxiety hysteria might prove to be a legacy from the ice age, when early mankind, threatened by the great freeze, had converted libido into anxiety. This state of terror must have generated the thought that in such a chilling environment, biological reproduction is the enemy of self-preservation, and primitive efforts at birth control must in turn have produced hysteria. And so on through the catalogue of mental distress. Ferenczi was supportive, indeed enthusiastic, but in the end . . . as its incurable remoteness from empirical evidence became all too obvious, it lost all credibility. But while it lasted, Freud's phylogenetic fantasy at once elated and disturbed him [pp. 367-368].
It is clear that, when it came to theorizing, Freud was a high roller. The more abstract and remote his theories were from clinical data, the riskier they were--requiring revision or worse. Some of his most brilliant theoretical intuitions, of course, paid off handsomely and have stood the test of time; some have not: the death instinct, his enduring application of Lamarckianism to psychoanalysis, his controversial speculations about Moses, his ready acceptance of Fliess's biorhythmic theories, readily come to mind. And there are some, like the structural theory under review here, which are highly abstract and yet are not too distant from empirical data and which turn out to be both successful and flawed at once.
This penchant of Freud's for abstract speculation, and his consequent overvaluation of theory--perhaps a vocational hazard amongst psychoanalysts--certainly had its roots in his character as some of his biographers suggest, but some component of it must have been contributed by the fact that he was a member of the Jewish intelligentsia and a member of the wider middle-European Germanic culture. It was thus all too natural for him to accept the tendencies in favor of the abstract, which are inherent in the German language, and the tendencies toward speculative theory that form part of the metaphysical Idealist tradition of Fichte, Hegel, and Ludwig Feuerbach, the last of whom Freud admired greatly. To this day Continental scientists tend to value theory more highly than Anglo-American scientists raised in the intellectual tradition of British Empiricism: Locke, Hume, and the American Pragmatists. I will return to this point. One of the things I like about Dr. Brenner's paper is that many of the ideas in it are already comfortably familiar. That is because it is in reality a summary statement of a series of a dozen or so of his publications written since 1971 which have led gradually, systematically, and more or less inevitably to his present view that certain important elements of the structural theory have served their purpose well for the past seventy years but must be revised in a way that will meet the needs of modern psychoanalysis.
His present paper cannot be fully appreciated without some familiarity with the data and arguments of Dr. Brenner's recent publications (1975, 1979, 1980, 1982a,b). It unfortunately puts those who are not familiar with them at something of a disadvantage. None of these publications had the primary purpose of replacing structural theory, but only of resolving an important clinical issue. Yet each of them resulted in some clarification of one or another aspect of the structural theory. Cumulatively, these changes and clarifications have, over the past ten or fifteen years, had a growing impact on the way analysts think, discuss their cases, and practice. The paper under discussion seems to me to represent the next reasonable stage in the psychoanalytic theory of the mind.
The ideas in Dr. Brenner's paper are, of course, not foreign to students of Freud. Central to the paper are the concepts of conflict and compromise formation among the components that students of the structural theory know so well: drive derivatives felt to be bad or dangerous giving rise to dysphoric signal affects which in turn call forth defenses to reduce unpleasure. What he suggests we drop are concepts of id, ego, and superego as special structures or agencies of the mind. In short, what is retained from the theory are its most valid and useful elements--mental dynamics--ideas without which there would be no such technique or discipline as psychoanalysis. Much of the rest, the tripartite structure of the mind as Freud conceived it in 1923, it seems to me, has withered away from disuse over the last twenty-five or thirty years. It is worth asking oneself when one actually last used the term id in professional discourse. I don't mean read the term, but actually used it in a sentence--especially in discussing clinical data. It is a term that now seems hopelessly old-fashioned to the ear--and mind. In fact, what Freud would have thought were manifestations of the id when he wrote "The Ego and the Id"--affects and even sexual fantasies--we understand today as compromise formations. In actual clinical discourse with our colleagues today, we rarely refer to the ego, as though it were a "structure" but rather we talk about specific defenses and specific functions such as reality testing or memory or perception. In fact this was true long before Dr. Brenner began his work. One of the first revisions of the structural theory by Hartmann (1958) and the other ego psychologists was the idea that the ego was better understood as an organization of functions. Now we know, through the work of Brenner and others, that any ego function can serve as a defense and no ego function is really autonomous--really free of conflict. In fact, knowing what we know now, the ego can never be conceived of as primarily anti-instinctual. In fact, no part of the mind can be considered anti-instinctual. Indeed, it would be more in keeping with our observations and understanding to say that drive derivatives pervade all our mental functioning. We know now that defenses can be instincts, instincts can be punitive, punishment can be pleasurable. And that, as Brenner has demonstrated, the superego is not merely a set of oedipal identifications but a set of compromise formations that have their own developmental sequence. It seems to me that what Dr. Brenner has done in this paper, and in all of those publications on which this paper is based, is to have moved the most powerful elements of Freud's theory from the scientific culture of late nineteenth-century middle Europe to the scientific culture of late twentieth-century America. Yankee that he is, Dr. Brenner has been brought up, like many of the rest of us, in the scientific tradition of Anglo-American empiricism and pragmatism. The net result is a stylistic shift in the way we think about scientific matters. Perhaps a shift in emphases might be a better way of putting it, because while the differences may not seem great between the two styles, the consequences may be far-reaching.
As I see it, Dr. Brenner's work as a whole and his viewpoint in this particular paper is characterized by an emphasis on psychoanalytic data as the final arbiter of theory, by a relative deemphasis on theory which cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by empirical evidence, by a relative intolerance for conceptual and terminological ambiguity, and finally by the view that psychoanalysis is not a special and unique science, but one of the natural sciences, closely related to biology, and as such shares methodological and other values common to all natural sciences. This, I think, is good for psychoanalysis, and good for science. And for this I think we owe Dr. Brenner a debt of gratitude.
Dr. Brenner says that conflict and compromise formation are ubiquitous in mental life. I understand what he means, and he has been able to demonstrate to my satisfaction that compromise formation is indeed ubiquitous. He says further that conflict can result in pathological or nonpathological compromise formations, and that sometimes it is hard to tell the difference. It is this idea that conflict can result in so-called normal compromise formations such as jokes, fantasies, vocational choice, and hobbies, that troubles me. That these are compromise formations, that is, interactions between component mental functions, I have no doubt, but that they result from what we call conflict I question. Can there be compromise formation without conflict? Maybe. The notion of conflict comes from Freud's earliest formulations of mental dynamics: the forces of the unconscious versus the forces of repression. It made sense then, especially when conflict was equated with pathology. I'm not so sure it makes as much sense now. I have several reasons for suggesting this. First, the notion of conflict in this context is essentially a metaphor. A "conflict" no more occurs in our minds than an army of white blood cell soldiers battle against germ invaders when we get an infection. What happens in our bodies is a series of biochemical events, and what happens in our minds at certain critical moments is that a more or less automatic interaction occurs between what we call wishes, dysphoric affects, defenses, moral needs, and cognitive elements. The net effect of this interaction may be a more or less enduring mental phenomenon we call a symptom or fantasy or some complex set of behaviors we call dancing or horseback riding, about which more in a moment.
Another reason why I would prefer to substitute the term interaction for conflict is that the latter suggests opposing forces--a victor and a vanquished. And indeed that is what Freud first had in mind. If repression was successful the offending unconscious was vanquished and mental health supervened; if the repressed succeeded in returning, pathology resulted. Nowadays, we know better. We know, for example, that many if not most drive derivatives do not get vanquished. They may get diminished, tilted, bent, shifted, twisted, distorted--practically anything but vanquished. Transformed, yes; opposed, maybe not. We know also, and here I agree with Dr. Brenner, that in every compromise formation drive derivatives, no matter how unacceptable they may be, get some degree of gratification. So it surely is a very imperfect form of opposition that we are talking about.
Let me give you a brief clinical illustration of how imperfectly opposed some drive derivatives may be. A highly intelligent, competent young professional woman became interested in horsemanship in the course of her analysis. She had never ridden before, but had always been vaguely interested in learning to ride. Now that she had the time and money, she took instruction and soon became an expert rider. She bought her own horse, spent much of her discretionary income on his upkeep--it was a large male horse. She spent many hours each weekend at the stable where he was kept and where she rode him with pleasure. But her greatest pleasure was derived from performing dressage, which the dictionary defines as "the art of training a horse in obedience and in precision movement."
This training naturally involved many small rewards and many small punishments administered with her riding crop to get the horse to respond with the proper degree of correctness. You will not be surprised to learn that as a child she had a long history of beating fantasies, and that as an adult one of her favorite masturbatory fantasies involved riding on the back of a man made to crawl on all fours and respond precisely to her every command lest he be beaten with a riding crop.
Was she conflicted? I'll leave it to Dr. Brenner to opine. To be sure there remained elements of her guilt-ridden incestuous wishes which never appeared either in her fantasy or her hobby, but in neither did she experience unpleasure, anxiety, or inhibition of function. Well, if they don't smell like conflict, and they don't taste like conflict, and they don't look like conflict, why should we call them conflict?
In summary I would suggest that Dr. Brenner's revisions of structural theory seem overdue, desirable, and clinically helpful, and that his reasons for suggesting them seem to me compelling. I caution only that because he has expanded the meaning of conflict to include normal compromise formations, it might be preferable to use the more general concept "interaction" instead of "conflict" in certain formulations.
Arlow, J., & Brenner, C. (1964), Psychoanalytic Concepts and the Structural Theory. New York: International Universities Press.
Brenner, C. (1975), Affects and psychic conflict. Psychoanal. Quart., 44:5-28.
------ (1979), The components of psychic conflict and its consequences in mental life. Psychoanal. Quart., 48:547-567.
------ (1980), Metapsychology and psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanal. Quart., 49:189-214.
------ (1982a), The concept of the superego: A reformulation. Psychoanal. Quart., 51:501-525.
------ (1982b), The Mind in Conflict. New York: International Universities Press.
Freud, S. (1915), The unconscious. Standard Edition, 14:161-204. London: Hogarth Press, 1957.
------ (1923), The ego and the id. Standard Edition, 19:3-59. London: Hogarth Press, 1961.
Gay, P. (1988), Freud: A Life for Our Time. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hartmann, H. (1958), Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: International Universities Press.
Yale Kramer, M.D.
