Mental conflict

“ These illustrate the dangers of affectional wound,—the sensitivity of personality to emotional shock. A conflict may make or break an individual.
Just what is it which differentiates between two lives of similar asocial behavior or suffering affectional wounds, one becoming disorganized, the other attaining higher levels of mental and social integration? Certain psychoanalytic biographies show struggles of eminent men and women who passed through periods of mental strain or moral failure, yet rose superior to and even strengthened by their wrestling with life. ”

“ The recognition of mental conflicts as disturbances of personality and determinants of conduct is as old as literature itself. They have been the theme of poets, 582dramatists and fiction writers of every age. ”

“ Absurd as it sounds, "nerves" turn out to be a question of morals; a neurosis, an affair of conscience; a nervous symptom an unsettled ethical struggle. The ethical struggle is not unusual; it is a normal part of man's life, the natural result of his desire to change into a more civilized being. The people in the world may be divided into three classes, according to the way they decide the conflict. ”

“ Nor are we concerned here with conduct which pertains more properly to social psychology. Our task is much more limited and simple, namely to inquire into the immediate conscious phenomena provoked by emotion, just as we have studied the physiological phenomena. We have seen that one such phenomenon is inhibition or repression of antagonistic instincts and sentiments provoked by conflict. (We shall see later that a conflict may arise 460between a conscious and an entirely subconscious sentiment with similar resulting phenomena.) ”

“ This is the struggle of the will which each one knows for himself; for who has not had a raging battle of motives occupy the center of the field while all else, even the sense of time, place and existence, gave way in the face of this conflict! This struggle continues until the decision is made, when suddenly all the stress and strain drop out and other objects may again have place in consciousness. ”

“ The course of the disorder appears to be that the rationalisations, developed by the subject to explain his inferiority, become so intimately connected with the affective basis of his trouble that they attain a reality and effectiveness which greatly relieve, or even wholly remove, the painfulness of the conflict. ”

“ Cognition and emotion are parted even in this last retreat,—who shall say that their antagonism may not just be one phase of the world-old struggle known as that between the spirit and the flesh?—a struggle in which it seems pretty certain that neither party will definitively drive the other off the field. ”

“ Throughout the history of civilisation, wherever we can trace the feelings and ideas which have prevailed on this matter and the resultant conduct, the problem has existed, often to produce discord, conflict, and misery. ”

“ This rest is won through the man's prior discipline in the toils of strife, in order that when the tumult of disturbance ceases, his mind, through the grace of contemplation, may be translated to gaze upon the face of truth. But since one attains to this rest only through labour and conflict, how can one reach it who has not gone down into the strife? ”

“ Whereas the sufferings of others, caused by our injustice and violence, enter the consciousness indirectly, that is, by the secondary channel of a mental picture, and not till they are understood by experience. ”

“ We have made men and women come together on the grounds of this superficial likeness and commonalty—their mental, and upper sympathetic consciousness. And so we have forced the blood to submission. Which means we force it into disintegration. ”

“ The conflicts are, in fact, clashes among certain individuals and groups of them, or else—and this is a subject to which social psychology has paid insufficient attention—the social struggle is in certain of its phases a conflict within the personal psyche itself. Suppose that the apparently impersonal element in social behavior is not impersonal in fact, but is, for the most part, the result of an impersonal manner of thinking about ourselves. Every psychic fact must really be an act of somebody. ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ By an analysis of the moral phenomena associated with the action of the human will, and, in particular, of the conflict which arises between "the tendency of all Will to make itself absolute," and the consciousness that, under the conditions of man's fallen state, nothing but misery could result both to the individual and the race from the fulfilment of this tendency, – Mr. ”

“ So there was conflict in his mind; but only a disturbing conflict. Reason acted too feebly on the side of these new-coming convictions. A desire to be at once, and to escape daily work and daily troubles, was stronger than any cold judgement of the case. ”

“ Nay, more, in any situation the more nearly the conflict is shown to be absolutely inevitable, arising out of the very nature of life as we know it,—completely justified, or at least FELT as inevitable on both sides,—the more are we shaken by the distinctive tragic emotion. The conflict of duties to one's self and to the world is the sharpest of tragedies. ”

“ Everywhere and at all times are we exposed to the action of these mental and moral spheres, which act upon and impress us in thousands of different ways, now carrying us along in some sudden public excitement in which passion drowns the voice of reason, and now causing us to drift in the wake of some stronger nature than our own whose active thought holds ours in a weak, assenting bondage. ”

“ It is through this process of conflict of divergent impulses to act that the individual arrives at decisions—as we say, "makes up his mind." Only where there is conflict is behavior conscious and self-conscious ”

“ I am quite as ready as you to admit that discord, sin, evil, death, and all the whole list of human ills and woes come from these bad thoughts held in the human mind and so externalized. I believe that the human man really sees, feels, hears, smells, and tastes these thoughts––that the functioning of the physical senses is wholly mental––takes place in mind, in thought only. That is, that the human mind thinks it sees, feels, hears ”

“ All human history presents itself to me as the unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to emerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion, prejudice, and ignorance. ”

“ The natural consequence is restlessness, agitation, anger, indecision, etc. The dissociation of personality, with the outcropping of the “b mood,” follows—a conflict due to the excitation of certain childhood complexes, conserved in the unconscious and embracing sentiments in which are incorporated the instinct of self-subjection or abasement. This “b mood” is a study in itself. ”

“ Such a persisting repression may be brought about either directly by volitional conflict or indirectly through the cultivation of antagonistic sentiments. The cultivation of an instinct is a common enough observation. Every one can point to some one of his acquaintance who has so fostered his instinct of anger or fear, has so cultivated the habit of one or the other reaction that he has become the slave of his emotion. ”

“ If we bear in mind that emotion means discharge of force, an adequate explanation of such phenomena in a great many instances, at least, is to be found in the principle of conflict and dissociation. The conflict is between the impulsive forces of the emotions pertaining either to antagonistic instincts or to sentiments organized within different systems. With the excitation of emotion, instincts and sentiments which have opposing conative tendencies are inhibited, repressed, or dissociated, 501and with them the systems with which they are organized. ”

“ The real stress and strain in life arises from the difficulty of applying principles to special cases in hand, and it is just this difficulty that is experienced amid the shock of the conflict by many souls, even those who are illuminated by the Holy Ghost. ”

“ Quite on the contrary, the mental agitation they cause bears witness to their reality. It is merely one more proof that a very intense social life always does a sort of violence to the organism, as well as to the individual consciousness, which interferes with its normal functioning. ”

“ Here are a thousand impulses and instincts drawing us, with infinite further possibilities suggesting themselves to reflection; the more developed our natures the more frequently do our desires conflict. Why is any one better than another? ”

“ But often there was conflict within the soul before it acquiesced in what it felt compelled to recognize; and sometimes there was clear revolt against current convictions, or practical insistence that a larger volume of the elements of human nature were fit for life eternal. ”

“ They will have to be honest and acknowledge the impulses which become active in them, they will have to hold their own in the conflict, they will fight or give up, and the tolerance of society which will inevitably be brought about by psychoanalytic explanation will come to their aid. ”

“ The conflict is produced by some important task or duty which is essential biologically and practically for the fulfilment of the ego of the individual, but before which an obstacle arises from which he shrinks, and thus halted cannot go on. ”

“ Every annoyance, resistance, or feeling of resentment contracts us in some way physically; if we turn our attention toward dropping that physical contraction, with a real desire to get rid of the resistance behind it, we shall find that dropping the physical strain opens the way to drop the mental and moral strain, and when we have really dropped the strain we invariably find reason and justice and even generosity toward others waiting to come to us. ”

“ When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament. ”

“ The troubles that beset weak souls may be dissipated, but new strength brings dreadful trials. Tremendous conflicts, undreamt-of in your innocence, will agitate your adventurous Intellect, penetrating into vast regions of Doubt, where the mind made for belief often reels into madness, goaded by harassing anxiety. ”

“ So also in the psychical life of man they play a very important part—the leading part in the more composite volitional processes, and they very often arise out of these latter when these have been often repeated. The actions that arise out of several conflicting motives of strong feeling-tone we call voluntary acts, or if we are clearly aware of a previous conflict of opposite motives, selective or discriminative acts. ”

“ Thus a hostile situation, an intensely disagreeable situation, may be met with energy: viz. planning, constructive flight, destructive action, or it may be met with a deënergization, confusion, paralysis, hopeless anger. It may cause an intense inner conflict with high constant emotions, fatigue, incapacity to choose the proper action, and the peculiar agony of doubt. ”

“ Hence the antagonisms that arise at every point of human contact. The sum of these antagonisms is what we call the struggle of life, which is merely the struggle of each to survive at the expense of his fellows, and is therefore barbaric. ”

“ To heighten the danger of a conflict between natures essentially incompatible, both were in a morbid and nervous state, consumed with discontent, sensitive to the most trifling injury, abandoned to a fierce egoism, which the course of their lives and the circumstances of their profession kept constantly inflamed. ”

“ To the restraints constituted by mental representations of the intrinsic effects of actions, which, in their simpler forms, have been evolving from the beginning, are added the restraints caused by mental representations of extrinsic effects, in the shape of political, religious, and social penalties. ”

“ They are not arbitrary answers, but betray the inmost subconscious thoughts, those things marked, split off from consciousness and repressed into the unconscious. Associations, like dreams, never lie. ”

“ It is evident, that, theoretically, if antecedent conditions have prepared the emotional soil, and if an emotional complex, an intense sentiment, or instinct should be aroused by some stimulus, any one of a number of different possible psychopathic states might ensue, largely through the mechanism of conflict, according, on the one hand, to the degree and extent of the dissociation, inhibition, etc., established, and on the other to the character and systematization of the emotional complex or instinct. ”

“ It is all the more surprising that the struggle, in this case, is no longer between instinct and reflection, but between two instincts, the conservative and the destructive, of which the one which usually is the strongest succumbs, and the individual turns against himself the destructive tendency originally destined to act on others. ”

“ They arc examples of the lowered mental states, unable to stand the rivalry with fellowmen, and ready to give up the struggle whenever the example of others who have already given it up is brought prominently to their notice. ”