Conflict,Functional Disruption,and Defense-Effectiveness

The concepts of conflict and defense are clarified, and a model of defense-effectiveness is reconstructed from psychoanalytic usage. Defenses are effective if underlying conflicts are kept from becoming overtly disruptive. Thematic and associative indices of drive-conflict are compared with questionnaire measures of drive-related functional disruption. Three drives are sampled: aggression, dependency, and achievement. Only the first two yield positive findings. Although the aim of the study, internal consistency, is achieved, an hypothesis for external validation is also proposed.     

A Theory of Multiple-Case Research

ABSTRACT Psychologists have generally neglected the detailed study of lives because it has not seemed to contribute to the formulation of general truths The insistence that each life is unique and therefore incomparable has shaped the modern disciplines of personality and social psychology, segregating them from each other and blocking a clear view of how social facts and psychological processes inform each other In the proposed model of multiple-case study, individual cases, captured through intensive exploratory interviews, are brought into “conversation” with one another This permits shared realities to be reconstructed out of individuals' perspectival images But in daily life such reconstructions often fail to be made because the social conditions favorable to a conversation among those viewing a shared reality from characteristic vantage points (for instance, oppressors and oppressed, or even fellow victims) are not met The resulting silence itself must become a topic of conversation before social knowledge can be created or social problems solved The pertinent epistemological presuppositions are illustrated by reference to sample multiple-case studies     

The psychobiographer's authority: questions of interpretive scope and logic

Two charges are often raised against psychobiographers' authority (as well as popularized analytic case formulations): reductionism and causal overreach. The first pertains to interpretations that rely exclusively on analytic concepts but ignore the essential contributions made by neighboring disciplines, such as history, to the elucidation of lives lived elsewhere or in the past. The second charge is sometimes stimulated by exaggerated interpretive claims, but often reflects the critic's misunderstanding of the logical structure of genetic explanations. Three case studies illustrate reductionism as well as safeguards against it. They also support a critical discussion of the alleged logical defect.