Abstract
Background: The concept of psychodynamic conflict is essential to psychodynamic theory and therapy. In classical psychodynamic therapy, unconscious conflict themes need to be identified by the therapist and brought to the patient’s awareness, in order to work through and ultimately solve them. According to theory, touching upon conflict-related topics leads to arousal, followed by activation of defense mechanisms such as repression. Starting with C.G. Jung’s association studies more than 100 years ago, various proposals have been made to investigate psychodynamic conflicts based on free association and psychophysiological measures. This study presents an attempt to identify and differentiate between psychodynamic conflict themes in patients, using an adopted version of Jung’s paradigm that had in previous studies been applied to healthy subjects.Method: Seventeen patients suffering from depression and other mental disorders associated freely to different cue sentences. Prior to the experimental procedure, patients’ individual psychodynamic conflict types were assessed through clinical interviews. Sentences were either neutral, negative (but not conflict-related), or related to specific types of psychodynamic conflicts. Memory for the first three associations was later tested in an unexpected recall task. Skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded and analyzed together with reaction times (RTs) and self-ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and agreement with cue sentences.Results: Patients showed reduced memory performance for associations to conflict-related sentences in general, compared with negative and neutral sentences. Agreement with conflict-related sentences was lower compared to neutral but not negative sentences. Memory was negatively correlated with RTs and SCR. RTs were longer for conflict types that had been rated as relevant in clinical interviews prior to the association task, compared to the other, non-relevant conflict types.Conclusion: Our study shows that some putative markers of repression of psychodynamic conflicts previously established in healthy participants also occur in patients. Moreover, it provides evidence that general conflict effects differ from specific effects of personally relevant conflicts.
Highlights
Psychodynamic conflicts constitute a central part of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theory (Brenner, 1982; Mentzos, 1992; Person et al, 2005; Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD) Task Force, 2008)
Presenting subjects with a list of stimulus words and asking them to name the first word coming to their mind, he discovered that some associations were generated with a delay and accompanied by higher Galvanic Skin Responses [ called Skin Conductance Response (SCR) or Electrodermal Activity (EDA)]
There were no differences in self-rated agreement (t16 = 0.42; p = 0.683), valence (t16 = 0.35; p = 0.732), or arousal (t16 = 1.16; p = 0.263) between personally relevant and non-relevant conflict types. Before discussing this particular study’s results and implications, we would first like to address a fundamental epistemological question regarding the operationalization of repression and psychodynamic conflict in this study: (How) can behavioral or psychophysiological data, such as memory or SCR, be interpreted as reflecting conflict or repression? What are the theoretical assumptions behind this claim? Aren’t there better alternative explanations of the observed behavioral and psychophysiological data? In the following, we will provide some thoughts on these questions
Summary
The concept of psychodynamic conflict is essential to psychodynamic theory and therapy. Unconscious conflict themes need to be identified by the therapist and brought to the patient’s awareness, in order to work through and solve them. This study presents an attempt to identify and differentiate between psychodynamic conflict themes in patients, using an adopted version of Jung’s paradigm that had in previous studies been applied to healthy subjects. Method: Seventeen patients suffering from depression and other mental disorders associated freely to different cue sentences. Negative (but not conflict-related), or related to specific types of psychodynamic conflicts. Skin conductance response (SCR) was recorded and analyzed together with reaction times (RTs) and self-ratings of emotional valence, arousal, and agreement with cue sentences
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