Analyzing Intrapsychic Conflict: Compromise Formation as an Organizing Principle

Abstract

The author highlights the idea that analysts’ recognition of intrapsychic conflict and compromise formation provides them with a most effective way to formulate their patients’ problems. A clinical illustration is presented, with attention to the analyst’s use of these concepts during the course of the patient’s treatment. The author discusses ways in which his thinking about intrapsychic conflict, compromise formation, and unconscious fantasy informs his approach to clinical work. He emphasizes that viewing compromise formation as the organizing principle of much of mental life gives analysts an effective way to understand the underlying structure of the psychic phenomena in which they are interested.