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Emotional conflict


Emotional conflict is the presence of different and opposing emotions relating to a situation that has recently taken place or is in the process of being unfolded. They may be accompanied at times by a physical discomfort, especially when 'a functional disturbance has become associated with an emotional conflict in childhood', and in particular by tension headaches 'expressing a state of inner tension...[or] caused by an unconscious conflict'.

For C. G. Jung, "emotional conflicts and the intervention of the unconscious are the classical features of...medical psychology". Equally, 'Freud's concept of emotional conflict as amplified by Anna Freud...Erikson and others is central in contemporary theories of mental disorder in children, particularly with respect to the development of psychoneurosis'.

'The early stages of emotional development are full of potential conflict and disruption'. Infancy and childhood are a time when 'everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate' and when 'totally opposite, extreme feelings about them must be getting put together too. Which must be pretty confusing and painful. It's very difficult to discover you hate someone you love'. Development involves integrating such primitive emotional conflicts, so that 'in the process of integration, impulses to attack and destroy, and impulses to give and share are related, the one lessening the effect of the other', until the point is reached at which 'the child may have made a satisfactory fusion of the idea of destroying the object with the fact of loving the same object'.

Once such primitive relations to the mother[er] have been at least partially resolved, 'in the age period two to five or seven, each normal infant is experiencing the most intense conflicts' relating to wider relationships: 'ideas of love are followed by ideas of hate, by jealousy and painful emotional conflict and by personal suffering; and where conflict is too great there follows loss of full capacity, inhibitions...symptom formation'.

Defenses against emotional conflict include 'splitting and projection. They deal with intrapsychic conflict not by addressing it, but by sidestepping it'.Displacement too can help resolve such conflicts: 'If an individual no longer feels threatened by his father but by a horse, he can avoid hating his father; here the distortion way a way out of the conflict of ambivalence. The father, who had been hated and loved simultaneously, is loved only, and the hatred is displaced onto the bad horse'.


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