The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  In this section, we discuss several important ideas deriving from the work of psychodynamic theorists that are particularly relevant to conflict practitioners. Undoubtedly, many more ideas could be expressed in a detailed and comprehensive exposition of psychodynamic viewpoints than we attempt to present in this chapter.

  Conflict with Another Can Lead to Intrapsychic Conflict and Anxiety.

  People may feel anxious because they sense they are unable to control their destructive or evil impulses toward the other in a heated conflict. Or the conflict may lead to a sense of helplessness and vulnerability if they feel overwhelmed by the power and strength of the other. Freud called the first type of internal conflict id-superego conflict (between a primitive impulse and conscience) and the second type an ego-reality conflict (between an immature self and a threatening reality). Later psychoanalysts used somewhat different language, speaking of a conflict among “internal objects” or between internalized images of self and of significant adults (as between an evil self and a harsh or punitive parent or a weak self and an overwhelming, controlling parent).

  If the anxiety aroused by the conflict with another is intense, the individual may rely on unconscious defense mechanisms to screen it out in an attempt to reduce the anxiety. Anxiety is most likely to be aroused if one’s basic security, self-conception, self-worth, or social identity is threatened. Defense mechanisms are pathological or ineffective if they create the conditions that produce anxiety, thus requiring continued use of the defense. For example, a student who may be anxious about his intellectual abilities avoids studying and as a consequence does poorly in his course work. He rationalizes that his poor grades are due to lack of motivation and effort. His grades further his anxiety about his ability, which in turn fuels his defenses of avoidance and rationalization. The defenses would not be pathological if in fact external circumstances had prevented him from studying and, given the opportunity, he would have put much effort into his studies.

  The defense mechanisms that people use are determined in part by their layered personality, which may have given rise to a characterological tendency to employ certain defense mechanisms rather than others, and also in part by the situation they confront. Psychoanalysts have identified many defense mechanisms; they are usually discussed in relation to intrapsychic conflict. We believe that they are also applicable in interpersonal and other external conflict. We have space to discuss only a number of the important ones for understanding conflict with others (see Fenichel, 1945, and Freud, 1937, for fuller discussions):

  Denial occurs when it is too disturbing to recognize the existence of a conflict (as between husband and wife about their affection toward one another, so they deny it—repressing it so that it remains unconscious, or suppressing it so they do not think about it).

  Avoidance involves not facing the conflict, even when you are fully aware of it. To support avoidance, you develop ever-changing rationalizations for not facing the conflict (“I’m too tired,” “This is not the right timing,” “She’s not ready,” “It won’t do any good”).

  Projection allows denial of faults in yourself. It involves projecting or attributing your own faults to the other (“You’re too hostile,” “You don’t trust me,” “You’re to blame, not me,” “I’m attacking to prevent you from attacking me”). Suspicion, hostility, vulnerability, hypervigilance, and helplessness, as well as attacking or withdrawing from the potential attack of the other, are often associated with this defense.

  Projection allows denial of faults in yourself. It involves projecting or attributing your own faults to the other (“You’re too hostile,” “You don’t trust me,” “You’re to blame, not me,” “I’m attacking to prevent you from attacking me”). Suspicion, hostility, vulnerability, hypervigilance, and helplessness, as well as attacking or withdrawing from the potential attack of the other, are often associated with this defense.

  Reaction formation involves taking on the attributes and characteristics of the other with whom you are in conflict. The conflict is masked by agreement with or submission to the other by flattering and ingratiating yourself with the other. A child who likes to be messy but is anxious about her mother’s angry reactions may become excessively neat and finicky in a way that is annoying to her mother.

  Displacement involves changing the topic of the conflict or changing the party with whom you engage in conflict. Thus, if it is too painful to express openly your hurt and anger toward your spouse because he is not sufficiently affectionate, you may constantly attack him as being too stingy with money. If it is too dangerous to express your anger toward your exploitative boss, you may direct it at a subordinate who annoys you.

  Counterphobic defenses entail denial of anxiety about conflict by aggressively seeking it out—by being confrontational, challenging, or having a chip on your shoulder.

  Escalation of the importance of the conflict is a complex mechanism that entails narcissistic self-focus on your own needs with inattention to the other’s needs, histrionic intensity of emotional expressiveness and calling attention to yourself, and demanding needfulness. The needs involved in the conflict become life-or-death issues, the emotions expressed are intense, and the other person must give in. The function of this defense is to get the other to feel that your urgent needs must have highest priority.

  In intellectualization and minimization of the importance of the conflict, you do not feel the intensity of your needs intellectually but instead experience the conflict with little emotion. You focus on details and side issues, making the central issue from your perspective in the conflict seem unimportant to yourself and the other.

  The psychoanalytical emphasis on intrapsychic conflict, anxiety, and defense mechanisms highlights the importance of understanding the interplay between internal conflict and the external conflict with another. Thus, if an external conflict elicits anxiety and defensiveness, the anxious party is likely to project onto, transfer, or attribute to the other characteristics similar to those of internalized significant others who in the past elicited similar anxiety in unresolved earlier conflict. Similarly, the anxious party may unconsciously attribute to himself the characteristics he had in the earlier conflict. Thus, if you are made very anxious by a conflict with a supervisor (you feel your basic security is threatened), you may distort your perception of the supervisor and what she is saying so that you unconsciously experience the conflict as similar to unresolved conflict between your mother and yourself as a child.

  If you or the other is acting defensively, it is important to understand what is making you or her anxious, what threat is being experienced. The sense of threat, anxiety, and defensiveness hampers developing a productive and cooperative problem-solving orientation toward the conflict. Similarly, transference reactions—for example, reacting to the other as though she were similar to your parent—produces a distorted perception of the other and interferes with realistic, effective problem solving. You can sometimes tell when the other is projecting a false image onto you by your own countertransference reaction: you feel that she is attempting to induce you to enact a role that feels inappropriate in your interactions with her. You can sometimes become aware of projecting a false image onto the other by recognizing that other people do not see her this way or that you are defensive and anxious in your response to her with no apparent justification.

  Irrational Deterrents to Negotiation.

  There are many reasons that otherwise intelligent and sane individuals may persist in behaviors that perpetuate a destructive conflict harmful to their rational interests. Following are some of the common reasons

  Perpetuating the conflict enables one to blame one’s own inadequacies, difficulties, and problems on the other so that one can avoid confronting the necessity of changing oneself. Thus, in the couple I (M.D.) treated (see the Introduction to this Handbook), the wife perceived herself to be a victim and felt that her failure to achieve her professional goals was due to her husband’s unfair treatment of
her as exemplified by his unwillingness to share responsibilities for the household and child care. Blaming her husband provided her with a means of avoiding her own apprehensions about whether she personally had the abilities and courage to fulfill her aspirations. Similarly, the husband who provoked continuous criticism from his wife for his domineering, imperious behavior employed criticisms to justify his emotional withdrawal, thus enabling him to avoid dealing with his anxieties about personal intimacy and emotional closeness. Even though the wife’s accusations concerning her husband’s behavior were largely correct, as were the husband’s toward her, each had an investment in maintaining the other’s noxious behavior because of the defensive self-justifications such behavior provided.

  Perpetuating the conflict enables one to maintain and enjoy skills, attitudes, roles, resources, and investments that one has developed and built up during the course of one’s history. The wife’s role as “victim” and the husband’s role as “unappreciated emperor” had long histories. They had well-honed skills and attitudes in relation to their respective roles that made their roles very familiar and natural to enact in times of stress. Less familiar roles, in which one’s skills and attitudes are not well developed, are often avoided because of the fear of facing the unknown. Analogous to similar social institutions, these personality institutions also seek out opportunities for exercise and self-justification, and in so doing they help to maintain and perpetuate themselves.

  Perpetuating the conflict enables one to have a sense of excitement, purpose, coherence, and unity that is otherwise lacking in one’s life. Some people feel aimless, dissatisfied, at odds with themselves, bored, unfocused, and unenergetic. Conflict, especially if it has dangerous undertones, can serve to counteract these feelings: it can give a heightened sense of purpose as well as unity and can also be energizing as one mobilizes oneself for struggle against the other. For depressed people who lack self-esteem, conflict can be an addictive stimulant to mask an underlying depression.

  Perpetuating the conflict enables one to obtain support and approval from interested third parties. Friends and relatives on each side may buttress the opposing positions of the conflicting parties with moral, material, and ideological support. For the conflicting parties, changing their positions and behaviors may entail the dangers of loss of esteem, rejection, and even attack from others who are vitally significant to them.

  How does a therapist or other third party help the conflicting parties overcome such deterrents to recognizing that their bitter, stalemated conflict no longer serves their real interests? The general answer, which is quite often difficult to implement in practice, is to help each of the conflicting parties change in such a way that the conflict is no longer maintained by conditions in the parties that are extrinsic to the conflict. In essence, this entails helping each of the conflicting parties to achieve the self-esteem and self-image that would make them no longer need the destructive conflict process as a defense against their sense of personal inadequacy, their fear of taking on new and unfamiliar roles, their feeling of purposelessness and boredom, and their fears of rejection and attack if they act independently of others. Fortunately the strength of the irrational factors binding the conflicting parties to a destructive conflict process is often considerably weaker than the motivation arising from the real havoc and distress resulting from the conflict. Emphasis on this reality, if combined with a sense of hope that the situation can be changed for the better, provides a good basis for negotiation.

  Summary and Critique of the Psychodynamic Approach.

  We have not attempted to present an exposition of the specific theories of the many contributors to the development of psychoanalytical theory, from Freud to today. Rather, we seek to draw from these theories some of the major ideas that are useful to conflict practitioners and that can be briefly presented.

  Psychoanalysis has been criticized, particularly the earlier Freudian version, which no longer seems appropriate in light of the changes made by later theorists: it is too biologically deterministic, too sexist, too pessimistic, and too focused on sex and aggression as the motives of behavior, as well as not oriented at all to positive motivations, to the learning and development of cognitive functions or to the broader societal and cultural determinants of personality development. Nevertheless, it is a useful framework for understanding issues that we all confront during development (security, control and power, sexual identity, transformation from childhood to adulthood) and the problems and personality residues that may result from inadequate care and harsh circumstances during our early years.

  The discussion of psychodynamics in this section has focused on the psychodynamics of individuals in conflict situations. However, psychodynamic theory has also been used to throw light on issues of war and peace (Gratch, 2012), the Arab-Israeli conflict (Falk, 2004), international relations (Volkan, 1988, 2009), the rise of fascism (Reich, 1946), Hitler’s ideology (Koenigsberg, 1975), as well as on many other topics related to conflict.

  Psychoanalysis is not a scientific theory that was developed and tested in a scientific laboratory, as is the case for most of the theories presented elsewhere in this Handbook. Rather, it is a mosaic of subtheories mainly developed in clinically treating psychopathology. Many of its concepts are not defined so as to indicate how they can be observed and measured. It is instead an encompassing intellectual framework for thinking about personality and its development, one that has given rise to a variety of useful subtheories and ideas, many of which are testable and indeed have been tested in research.

  Need Theories

  Under this heading, we consider some of the ideas of Henry A. Murray and Abraham Maslow, the most influential of the need theorists.

  Murray’s Need Theory of Personality.

  Murray’s approach to personality was influenced by the work of Jung, Freud, and their successors, and he was one of the first psychologists to translate psychodynamic concepts and ideas into testable hypotheses. Unlike their concern with the abnormal, Murray’s focus was on the normal personality. The most distinctive feature of his theory is its complex system of motivational concepts. In his theory, needs arise not only from internal processes but also from environmental forces.

  Murray’s most influential contribution to personality theory is the concept of the individual as a striving, seeking being: his orientation reflects primarily a motivational psychology. As he wrote, “The most important thing to discover about an individual . . . is the superordinate directionality (or directionalities) of his activities, whether mental, verbal, or physical” (1951, p. 276). This concern with directionality led him to develop the most complete taxonomy of needs ever created.

  Need is a force in the brain region that organizes perception, thought, and action so as to change an existing unsatisfactory condition. Needs can be evoked by environmental as well as internal processes. They vary in strength from person to person and from situation to situation. Murray hypothesized the existence of about two dozen needs and characterized them in some detail. He insisted that adequate understanding of human motivation must incorporate a sufficiently large number of variables to reflect, at least in part, the tremendous complexity of human motives.

  Working from Murray’s theory, McClelland and his colleagues (McClelland, Atkinson, Clark, and Lowell, 1953; McClelland, 1971) did extensive research on four basic needs: achievement, affiliation, power, and autonomy. Those high in need of achievement are concerned with improving their performance, do best on a moderately challenging task, prefer personal responsibility, and seek performance feedback. Persons rated high in the need for affiliation are concerned with maintaining or repairing relationships, are rewarded by being with friends, and seek approval from friends and strangers. Those in need of power are concerned with their reputation and find themselves motivated in a situation presenting hierarchical conditions. In their desire to attain prestige, they are likely to engage in competition more than the other types do. Finally, those with hi
gh autonomy needs want to be independent, unattached, and free of restraint.

  Murray’s theory is a rich and complex view of personality. It can help practitioners become aware of the diversity of human needs and their expression, as well as the external circumstances that tend to evoke them and the childhood experiences that lead individuals to varied life striving. Its major deficiency is the lack of a well-defined learning and developmental theory of what determines the acquisition and strength of an individual’s needs.

  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

  Although Abraham Maslow, early in his professional career, coauthored an excellent textbook on abnormal psychology with a psychoanalyst, he came to feel that a psychology based on the study of the abnormal was bound to give a pessimistic, limited view of the human personality and not take into account altruism, love, joy, truth, justice, beauty, and other positive features of human life. Maslow was one of the founders of the humanistic school of psychology, which emphasizes the positive aspects of human nature.

  Maslow is best known for his postulation of a hierarchy of human needs (Maslow, 1954); our discussion in this chapter is limited to this area of his work. In order of priority, he identified five types of needs:

  Physiological needs—for air, water, and food and the need to maintain equilibrium in the blood and body tissues in relation to various substances and types of cell. Frustration of these needs leads to apathy, illness, and death.

  Safety needs—for security, freedom from fear and anxiety, shelter, protection from danger, order, and predictable satisfaction of one’s basic needs. Here, frustration leads to fear, anxiety, rage, and psychosis.