I am honored to have been asked to participate in this discussion. To say that Dr. Brenner is abandoning structural theory is a useful but misleading hyperbole. To the contrary, while retaining the basic principles of functional conflict and compromise, Dr. Brenner has abandoned as unnecessary and inaccurate the inferred agencies, which were once extrapolated from the clinical data, and he has adopted as his primary focus a level of abstraction closer to the data as we now view it. I believe his recommendation is an important one and consistent with the tendency in the history of ideas for theory to become more parsimonious as it is repeatedly tested against the data of observation.
While Dr. Brenner's reformulation may in time generate its own abstractions to organize sets of compromise formations, without the old agencies he makes life more difficult for us, not easier, as he demands a clinical discipline that relentlessly tries to follow the compromising mind in motion rather than resting on fixed entities. This discipline derives from the one he (1986) once taught himself through "continuing effort," it seemed so "difficult and unnatural."
We have struggled for years with the tendency, once a psychic function is named, to fix it in our minds. We have reminded ourselves that these reifications are only metaphors. But metaphors in the mind may have the same mental effect as do fixed entities. To call them metaphors does not eliminate the way they function to shape our thinking, especially that part of our thinking which is not conscious and deliberate.
Note that Dr. Brenner is not saying with Waelder and others that this level of abstraction can be ignored. He is not saying we can take it or leave it. He is saying, "Leave it;" we would be better off without the clutter in our minds. But for Dr. Brenner to suggest that we eliminate the agencies, does not with a stroke of the pen eliminate them. It is not possible to do away with a concept we have used for several generations, particularly when someone asks us to. Try not thinking about something. As the little boy said to Miss Muffet, "Don't think about spiders."
We have been this route before, when we were asked to throw away the concept of The Unconscious. Clinical data does not support the notion of an entity or a place called the unconscious. It supports the notion of the patient being unconscious of mental activity of all sorts. Yet the concept of the Unconscious lives in the mind as surely as it creeps into our speech. To eliminate it requires a tough disciplining of clinical attention.
The mind seeks familiar points of rest, particularly at times of difficulty. And Dr. Brenner's mandate exposes us to more conflict, not less. If he sharpens our clinical discipline, he draws us into deeper and more intimate confusion. If Dr. Brenner's seduction is minimalist in its theoretical appearance, the clinical windows through which the analyst now looks reveal a world more complex, less fixed, more specific in its conflictual detail.
The conflictual networks that open before us in Dr. Brenner's new model bear some metaphorical resemblance to neural networks, and if we can stretch that metaphor a bit, it strikes me that this is a particularly important time to stay as close to our clinical data as possible, as we begin to bridge what we observe clinically with what others are discovering neurophysiologically. Models like Edelman s (1992) value-laden re-entry circuits may in time bear some relation to our pleasure/unpleasure driven compromises.
Dr. Brenner's map identifies conflictual networks of compromise formations as the molecular structure of all mental life, both normal and pathological. And here I have a relatively minor disagreement. When Dr. Brenner says that psychoanalysis achieves "an alteration that results in a normal compromise formation in place of the pathological one that was formally present," he uses a misleading shorthand. His comment suggests the notion of "replacing" one thing with another. This idea of in place of" is an oversimplification with its own developmental history. It is the vestige of a theoretical line that travels back through "where id was, there shall ego be," which was similarly misleading, to the idea of "making the unconscious conscious." In fact Dr. Brenner has already convinced us that there is nothing to distinguish so-called normal from so-called pathological compromise formations except how well they are working, as judged, I should think, by the degree of subjectively experienced discomfort or "objectively" observed interference and inhibition. Nothing is "replaced;" modified perhaps, but all is on a continuum with no dynamic difference between a normal thought and a symptom. Hence in this context I believe "normal compromise formation" and "pathological compromise formation" are terms that should also be retired, because they do not fit the data well enough to qualify as separate entities, and they do not fit with the reality that analytic work is never done, either for the patient, or for the analyst as patient. We are too easily diverted from the knowledge that every activity on the part of the analyst follows the same rules as that of the patient and must be subjected to the same scrutiny.
We do not know where theory "sits in the mind," as Friedman (1988) puts it, or what effect it has in the different places it sits. What we do know is that working in the way Dr. Brenner suggests will be different for every analyst. And that difference has a developmental dimension, depending on how long we have used the old way. Dr. Brenner tells us he learned structural theory without ever having been "irrevocably committed to the topographic theory;" but he has learned his new theory after many years of working with structural theory, and the old way will continue to have an effect on him, as well as on many of us. It will be different for those who learn Dr. Brenner's way without ever having been "irrevocably committed" to any other. For many reasons, this among them, those we teach sometimes practice our ideas more radically than we do. For the rest of us the old ways do not vanish from the mind. They remain as not always conscious, and perhaps not always useless, clutter. This is the true test of Dr. Brenner's theory will come with the next generation, those less schooled in the old ways. They will determine whether we need the old categories. They and our patients, for if something valuable falls by the wayside, our patients will let us know that we need to go back and pick it up.
