ABSTRACT
Conflict is so well established in ordinary language that it may be said to have been naturalized, that is, to have come to seem a given aspect of the world, a hard fact of reality, one that is encountered or discovered in others and within oneself. Once naturalized, conflict is no longer considered merely one common and succinct way of referring to a certain kind of more or less stressful subjective experience. Freud drew heavily on ordinary language in the course of developing psychoanalytic theory and its particular principles of technique. Within the clinical dialogue, however, both impulse and defense are necessarily particularized in terms of persons, places, times, hierarchies of component interests and fantasies, memories, anticipations, acknowledged or unacknowledged ambivalence and doubt, and prior subjective experience within the analysis itself. Terry, had just exhibited new work and had received lavish praise from a noted figure in his field and from art critics.
