ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns the varieties of psychosocial adaptations that become stabilized in socially acceptable patterns of behavior. Its basic premise is that the operative social expectations for phenotypic (observable) behavior in a given role represent a stabilized compromise between private motives of high frequency in the personality genotypes of role incumbents and normative pressures stemming from public definitions of the role. The concept of a compromise formation originates in the work of Freud, who in 1896 proposed that neurotic, symptoms could be seen in these terms and later extended their applicability to dreams (1900) and many other imaginative and “accidental” acts of the individual. In 1923 he summarized the concept and its usage succinctly:
[Analytic] work has shown that the dynamics of the formation of dreams are the same as those of the formation of symptoms. In both cases we find a struggle between two trends, of which one is unconscious and ordinarily repressed and strives toward satisfaction—that is, wish-fulfilllment-while the other, belonging probably to the conscious ego, is disapproving and repressive. The outcome of this conflict is a compromise-formation (the dream or the symptom) in which both trends have found an incomplete expression (1923b, p. 242).
