Emotional conflict is the presence of different and opposing

emotions Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...

relating to a situation that has recently taken place or is in the process of being unfolded. They may be accompanied at times by a physical

discomfort Comfort (or being comfortable'')'' is a sense of physical or psychological ease, often characterized as a lack of hardship. Persons who are lacking in comfort are uncomfortable, or experiencing discomfort. A degree of psychological comfort c ...

, especially when a functional disturbance has become associated with an emotional conflict in childhood, and in particular by tension headaches "expressing a state of inner tension... rcaused by an unconscious conflict". For

C. G. Jung Carl Gustav Jung ( ; ; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philo ...

, "emotional conflicts and the intervention of the unconscious are the classical features of...medical

psychology Psychology is the science, scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immens ...

". Equally, "

Freud Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies explained as originating in conflicts i ...

's concept of emotional conflict as amplified by

Anna Freud Anna Freud (3 December 1895 – 9 October 1982) was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian-Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contribut ...

... Erikson and others is central in contemporary theories of mental disorder in children, particularly with respect to the development of

psychoneurosis Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving chronic distress, but neither delusions nor hallucinations. The term is no longer used by the professional psychiatric community in the United States, having been eliminated from th ...

In childhood development

"The early stages of emotional development are full of potential conflict and disruption". Infancy and childhood are a time when "everything is polarised into extremes of love and hate" and when "totally opposite, extreme ''feelings'' about them must be getting put together too. Which must be pretty confusing and painful. It's very difficult to discover you hate someone you love". Development involves integrating such primitive emotional conflicts, so that "in the process of integration, impulses to attack and destroy, and impulses to give and share are related, the one lessening the effect of the other", until the point is reached at which "the child may have made a satisfactory fusion of the idea of destroying the object with the fact of loving the same object". Once such primitive relations to the mother or motherer have been at least partially resolved, "in the age period two to five or seven, each normal infant is experiencing the most intense conflicts" relating to wider relationships: "ideas of love are followed by ideas of hate, by jealousy and painful emotional conflict and by personal suffering; and where conflict is too great there follows loss of full capacity, inhibitions...symptom formation".

Defences

Defenses against emotional conflict include " splitting and projection. They deal with intrapsychic conflict not by addressing it, but by sidestepping it". Displacement too can help resolve such conflicts: "If an individual no longer feels threatened by his father but by a horse, he can avoid hating his father; here the distortion way a way out of the conflict of

ambivalence Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and neg ...

. The father, who had been hated and loved simultaneously, is loved only, and the hatred is displaced onto the bad horse".

Physical symptoms

Inner emotional conflicts can result in physical discomfort or

pain Pain is a distressing feeling often caused by intense or damaging stimuli. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, ...

, often in the form of tension headaches, which can be episodic or chronic, and may last from a few minutes or hours, to days - associated pain being mild, moderate, or severe. "The physiology of nervous headaches still presents many unsolved problems", as in general do all such "physical alterations...rooted in unconscious instinctual conflicts". However physical discomfort or pain without apparent cause may be the way our body is telling us of an underlying

emotional Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition ...

turmoil and

anxiety Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat wh ...

, triggered by some recent event. Thus for example a woman "may be busy in her office, apparently in good health and spirits. A moment later she develops a blinding headache and shows other signs of distress. Without consciously noticing it, she has heard the foghorn of a distant ship, and this has unconsciously reminded her of an unhappy parting". While it is not easy, by relaxing, calming down, and trying to become

aware Awareness is the state of being conscious of something. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some inform ...

of what recent experience or event could have been the cause of the inner conflict, and then rationally looking at and dealing with the conflicting desires and

need A need is dissatisfaction at a point of time and in a given context. Needs are distinguished from wants. In the case of a need, a deficiency causes a clear adverse outcome: a dysfunction or death. In other words, a need is something required for a ...

s, a gradual dissipation and

relief Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces are bonded to a solid background of the same material. The term '' relief'' is from the Latin verb ''relevo'', to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that th ...

of the pain may be possible.

In the workplace

With respect to the

post-industrial In sociology, the post-industrial society is the stage of society's development when the service sector generates more wealth than the manufacturing sector of the economy. The term was originated by Alain Touraine and is closely related to s ...

age, " LaBier writes of 'modern madness', the hidden link between work and emotional conflict...feelings of self-betrayal, stress and burnout". His "idea, which gains momentum in the post-

yuppie Yuppie, short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional", is a term coined in the early 1980s for a young professional person working in a city. The term is first attested in 1980, when it was used as a fairly neu ...

late eighties...concludes that real professional success without regret of emotional conflict requires insanity of one kind or another".

Cultural examples

* Advice on fiction writing emphasises the "necessity of creating powerful, emotional conflicts" in one's characters: "characters create the emotional conflict and the action emerges from the characters". * Shakespeare's sonnets have been described as "implying an awareness of the possible range of human feelings, of the existence of complex and even contradictory attitudes to a single emotion" * For

Picasso Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and Scenic design, theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th ce ...

"the presence of death is always coincident with the taste for life...the superb violence of these emotional transports have led some people to call his work

expressionist Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radi ...

".Gaston Diehl, ''Picasso'' (Milan nd) p. 76 and p. 81

In childhood development

Defences

Physical symptoms

In the workplace

Cultural examples

See also

References

Further reading