Contemporary Conflict Theory

Sandy Abend has been a close friend of mine for more than twenty years. For decades longer I have been an admirer of his. The qualities that make Sandy a good friend and those that make him an important contributor to our psychoanalytic literature—not to mention an outstanding clinician—are, I think, quite similar. He combines 

qualities that we don’t expect to find together: he is at once gentle and firm, respectful of tradition (even a “true-believer”) and openminded, conservative and innovative, convinced and curious. These characteristics led him to propose a project that has been an important part of our friendship for a long time now. Sandy invited me to be part of a study group he was putting together; the members were senior analysts, all identified with particular points of view in which were entrenched. But the announced purpose of the group would be, as Sandy put it, “to read things that we wouldn’t ordinarily read.” In the balkanized psychoanalytic world of the time (and still although to a

lesser extent today) this wasn’t the kind of thing that one would imagine could engage the interest of analysts who were deeply committed to ideas and institutions that had shaped their long and successful professional careers. But it worked. Or, I should say, it is working, because the group continues to meet and continues to be a highlight of the professional lives of all of us who participate in it.

The spirit that moved Sandy to create our study group pervades and shapes his writing. More than many of today’s thinkers he is committed to a particular theoretical perspective; he is certainly not a pluralist nor to say the least) is he the sort of analyst who seeks out and embraces the latest trend. Sandy coined the term “modern conflict theory” and he remains loyal to the theory’s ideas and to its seminal thinkers. The loyalty is neither simply personal nor abstractly conceptual; he understands and deeply appreciates the enduring clinical value of the contributions

of earlier generations of psychoanalysts.