Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

http://apa.sagepub.com/ Charles Brenner on Compromise Formation

Charles Brenner J Am Psychoanal Assoc 1999 47: 875 DOI: 10.1177/00030651990470031402 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/content/47/3/875.2

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LETTERS

Charles Brenner on Compromise Formation

July 21, 1999. In Arnold Goldberg's recently published plenary address (JAPA 47/2) there appears the following statement: "My unhappiness with my unnamed colleague who urged me to return to the study of 'compromise formation' follows from the fact that she feels that everything is a compromise formation. If that is true, it can have no meaning, since once you say that 'everything is,' you have also said that nothing is.' We can only study differences" (p. 400). As a principal proponent of the view of the role of compromise formation in mental functioning to which this quotation refers (see Brenner 1976, 1982, 1994, 1998), I think the following remarks are in order. To say that everything in mental functioning that is of interest to us in our work as analysts is a compromise formation means that the mind regularly functions in such a way as to achieve as much pleasure as possible from gratification of sexual and aggressive wishes of childhood origin and, at the same time, to avoid as much as possible the unpleasure associated with those wishes. Freud (1894) discovered very early that this statement is correct as far as psychogenic symptoms are concerned. What I have emphasized is that it is correct not only for those aspects of mental functioning that are called pathological, but also for the ones that are customarily called normal. An objection that has been raised to this view is, I think, the one to which Goldberg meant to refer: if everything is compromise formation, how can one distinguish pathology from normalityi.e., how can one decide what is a symptom or a pathological character trait and what is not? I believe that the correct answer to this question runs as follows:
On what basis is one to decide whether a compromise formation is pathological. or normal? . . . [A] compromise formation is pathological when it is characterized by any combination of the following features: too much restriction of gratification of drive derivatives, too much inhibition of functional capacity, too much unpleasure, i.e. too much conscious anxiety, depressive affect, or bothtoo great a tendency to injure or destroy oneself, or too great conflict with one's environment i.e. usually, the people one comes into contact with. When any combination of these features of a compromise formation exceeds a certain limit, the compromise formation in question is properly classified as pathological [Brenner 1982, p. 150].

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Conversely, if a compromise formation allows for adequate gratification, not too much inhibition of function, not too much unpleasure, not

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Letters

too much self-injurious behavior, and not too much conflict with one's environment, it is to be considered normal. I hope that this brief statement will convince readers of JAPA that it is not correct to dismiss the view that compromise formation is ubiquitous in mental life on purely logical or philosophical grounds. The view in question has a meaning, one that can be tested and accepted or rejected according to its fit or lack of fit with observable data.
REFERENCES

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BRENNER, C. (1976). Psychoanalytic Technique and Psychic Conflict. New York: International Universities Press. (1982). The Mind In Conflict. New York: International Universities Press. (1994). The mind as conflict and compromise formation. Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis 3:473488. (1998). Beyond the ego and the id revisited. Journal of Clinical Psychoanalysis 7:165180. FREUD, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. Standard Edition 3:4561.
Charles Brenner 1040 Park Avenue New York, NY 10028 E-mail: EcBrenner@surfree.com

Arnold Goldberg Responds

July 28, 1999. Charles Brenner honors me by taking issue with a point I made in my article about the meaninglessness of asserting the universality of compromise formation. However, I hope my response to him can be seen as part of a much broader issue in science, one that I have addressed in The Prisonhouse of Psychoanalysis (1990) and that perhaps finds its best formulation in Karl Popper (1994). Brenner's position seems to be that all mental acts are compromise formations constructed from our psychic agencies. It therefore seems fair to say that his letter is a compromise formation, just as are my response and, indeed, my commentary on this response. One cannot ever swing free of this network of theoretical explanation, but after a while it ceases to be a matter of concern or interest. Essentially, to apply

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