ABSTRACT
This chapter, a sequel to McIntosh’s “Feeling Like a Fraud, Parts One and Two: (Stone Center Work in Progress, No. 18, 1985, and No. 37, 1989), tracks the author’s search for ways of coming into conflict which do not bring up feelings of fraudulence. It analyzes her exploration of what feel like more authentic methods of approaching contentious interactions. One key discovery is that she feels most authentic fighting the idea that life is conflict, i.e., life is war. Another is that intense class, gender, and race strife go on in her psyche, which serves as a micro-battlefield for macro-systems in the society. The analysis is placed in context of a theoretical model of double and conflicting structures within the psyche and the society, in which over-rewarded, vertically oriented elements are contrasted with laterally oriented, affiliative, informal elements of a “home sense.” Invention of less fraudulent forms for coming into traditional conflict is made easier by taking the complex and pluralistic home-sense seriously. If the self is plural, then conflict may nearly always be a simplification of it.
