Abstract
This article reviews psychoanalytic theories designed for the treatment of what were thought to be unresolved phase-specific developmental conflicts (i.e., conflicts originating in infantile libidinal and aggressive drives) that were not resolved in childhood. Conflict theory is reconsidered in light of the fact, originally stressed by Edward Bibring (1936) 1 , that therapeutic results with ego psychology (conflict theory) are less than what was hoped for, especially in the light of mounting evidence that patient and analyst constitute a psychological system. Curative forces in this system (i.e., in patients themselves and in their experience of the multifaceted analytic relationship) operate to preserve the “lost” analyst and his or her needed functions by the process of assimilating, integrating, and synthesizing these functions into what Freud called “the normal workings of the mind”—workings that prevent painful feelings (such as anxiety, depression, shame, deficiency, fragmentation, and deadness) fro...
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