I am of course most appreciative of Dr. Kramer's words of commendation and agreement and receive them with thanks. The one quibble he expressed was over the use of the word conflict. Here I agree with him. Conflict isn't just the right word. When the end result is a normal compromise formation, as in the illustration he gave of the patient who enjoyed training horses, the accompanying conscious emotion is at worst neutral, often pleasurable, and sometimes very much so. In such a case, in which satisfaction of sexual and aggressive wishes is so obvious, why use the word conflict, Dr. Kramer asks. Isn't it better to speak of interaction among various forces or tendencies within the mind than of conflict among them?
My own answer is a qualified yes. As Dr. Kramer pointed out, his patient's interest in horse training was a disguised version of her wish to beat a man (her father?), to possess his penis, and to be a man herself. Those wishes were opposed to an extent, at least. They didn't appear in consciousness without disguise. In their disguised form they were pleasurable, but only in disguise could they be so. So to use the word interaction requires that much of a gloss. One has to add to the term interaction the explanation that there is some degree of opposition or conflict among the interacting tendencies. Similarly, if one uses the word conflict one must add that the wishes that arouse opposition and conflict are, at the same time, satisfied and must make clear that in some (normal) cases the satisfaction is very considerable. I speak of conflict in order to remain closer to our usual way of expressing ourselves; in order, perhaps, to seem to differ as little as possible from what Freud wrote on the subject. Maybe Dr. Kramer is correct in saying that I should be bolder and use the term interaction as being closer to my meaning than is the term conflict. After all, Dr. Kramer is one of those whose encouragement emboldened me to write this paper in the first place!
Dr. Shapiro finds himself in disagreement with my major thesis. In his view the very fact that childhood sexual and aggressive wishes become associated with unpleasure and that defenses arise to curb those wishes and to mitigate the associated unpleasure, proves that there is a mental agency or structure, the ego, that has developed and is operative. In his words, "We need to postulate structures that tell us about how we organize our thoughts; that is, how we make compromises between what we wish and what we believe reality demands" (p. 557). And later, "what in the beginning was the fear of the loss of the object later becoming fear of the loss of the love of the object. That change signals that we function on a more abstract level than earlier; we can consider the symbolic as well as the concrete. That symbolic capacity is based on yet another human faculty that cannot be accounted for by an egoless psychoanalysis" (p. 558). I'm sure Dr. Shapiro will agree that such statements, if advanced by themselves (i.e., if advanced without reference to any data of observation), even by way of illustration, beg the very question I attempted to raise in my paper. By themselves they unfortunately remain only statements of opinion without reference to the reasons for the opinion. Part of the responsibility is mine, I believe. I obviously did not make it clear enough in my presentation just what my reasons are for decrying the use of the term defense mechanism. I should have said more explicitly that I agree with Dr. Shapiro and with every other analyst I know that defenses are of the greatest importance in mental life. What I have argued elsewhere and have summarized perhaps too briefly in the present paper is that defense mechanism is not a useful term for two reasons. For one thing, any aspect of mental functioning can be used defensively. Defensive functioning is not limited to a few special mechanisms that therefore deserve a special name. For another thing, any of the features of mental functioning that we are accustomed to call defense mechanisms can be used and regularly are used in the service of gratification as well. To call repression a defense mechanism, for example, obscures the fact that repression often functions to facilitate gratification of drive derivatives (for a more extended discussion, see Brenner [1982]).
Thus when Dr. Shapiro argues that we cannot dispense with repression, displacement, isolation, and other features of mental functioning as "explanatory of 'the way in which we pit one thought against the other,' " I am fully in agreement with him, rather than in opposition, as he appears to think. I would certainly not support, nor am I proposing, "a theory without mechanisms or operative rules," as Dr. Shapiro suggests.
Brenner, C. (1982), The Mind in Conflict. New York: International Universities Press.
