The Conflict Analysis Battery: Measuring the Unconscious with A Didactic, Diagnostic and Therapeutic Self-Assessment
The Conflict Analysis Battery (CAB) is an emotional education tool taping creativity for self-discovery, helping clients to follow the natural path to self-healing. It introduces a radical innovation in psychological assessment, offering individuals the key tools to self-understanding and mental health professionals an integrated humanistic diagnostic framework. The assessment is an emotional education; it aids the test taker to learn about psychology as a relational pattern and as a syndrome of six emotions. An introductory essay clarifies how the mind works. The CAB is based on understanding our unconscious mechanism as a conflict resolution process consisting of six roles: stress, response, anxiety, defense, role reversal, and compromise leading to four alternative ways of resolving conflict as diagnostic categories of wellness. These are submissiveness and dominance, and their cooperative and antagonistic variations.
The Conflict Analysis Battery identifies the unconscious as having clearly measurable dimensions: The four modalities and the six-role conflict resolution pattern.
The CAB combines a diagnostic instrument, a wellness-based personality inventory, and a therapeutic one: a set of interactive creativity exercises. These tasks utilize creativity to identify personal patterns of resolving conflict, highlighting the characteristics ways of dealing with stress.
The personality inventory is a diagnostic tool that identifies one’s personality type as one of four alternative relational modalities wellness diagnoses or as a spectrum of modalities. The inventory’s formal dimensions consist of the three formal dichotomies of passivity/activity, antagonism/cooperation and alienation versus mutual respect. These identify four formally interrelated conflict resolution alternatives: the relational modalities, diagnostic categories of wellness, and the psychic tension corresponding to intensity of conflicts identifying psychopathology as qualification of wellness. The three dichotomies as reciprocity, negation and correlation are not arbitrary criteria. They are interrelated with the formula of the equilibrial scale:
Identity=Reciprocity x Negation x Correlation. The formula connects an imbalance of the trays of a scale with the three operations that restore the equilibrium. This is the formula of the human unconscious restoring emotional balance.
The set of interactive creativity exercises are therapeutic. The metaphors lead to insights about one’s emotional pattern and skills to modify one’s responses and thus impact on the related emotional experiences. The creativity exercises identify the six role-states process as the syndromal unfolding of the conflict resolution modalities. The six role states correspond to three mental pendulum oscillations transforming energy abiding by the laws of the Simple Harmonic Motion.
Energy of conflict = to the normative deviation from the rest state x one’s emotional dependency needs. This energy is experienced as unpleasant and is processed automatically to resolution of conflict and emotional relief through normative conciliation. It takes three pendulum oscillations to transform chaos to order or conflict to resolution.
Thus the CAB helps to identify the personal relational modality and also to identify it as a syndromal psychodynamic pattern unfolding as a sequence of interrelated emotions. The emotions are made clear sampling creativity. Each of the exercises in the CAB corresponds to a stage in this six-role process. But what is of scientific significance is that these emotions may be understood as a quantum of energy being transformed to a stable energy and emotion, the compromise as negative entropy. This reflects science rather than just art.
The creativity exercises as a set of metaphors identifying the six emotions of the six-role state unconscious conflict resolution process:
Conflictual Memories identify the Stress experience.
The Mask Test portrays the choice of Responses.
What is hidden behind the mask identifies one’s Anxiety.
The Animal Metaphor reveals one’s Defensive behaviors.
The Dream Metaphor identifies the state of Role Reversal.
The Short Story Metaphor reveals one’s choice of Compromise or Resolution.
The CAB's wellness-based model shifts focus from isolated emotions or experiences of symptom to recognizing their interconnection as a syndrome identified as a relational modality, which determines alternative approaches to resolution. Rather than investigating individual issues, the CAB probes them as a broad pattern, helping the person to understand symptoms and experiences as connected in a chain reaction that is manageable. The therapeutic experience integrate a range of psychotherapies, including art, psychodynamic, cognitive behavioral, and narrative therapies but it also grounds insights onto scientific formulas.
FEATURES OF THE CONFLICT ANALYSIS BATTERY
The Conflict Analysis Battery represents a radical breakthrough in psychological assessment technology. It has the following differentiating characteristics:
1. The assessment is theory based; it measures the dimensions of the unconscious as a natural science conflict resolving entity with physical and formal dimensions. The findings validate the premise of the Formal Theoretical assumption that the unconscious resolves conflicts along a six-role sequence guided by three formal operations.
2. It is a battery. It combines a personality inventory with a set of projectives. The two tests are complementary in evaluating two different dimensions of the same entity. The personality inventory measures the three formal operations; the projective techniques identify the six roles of the dialectic process as syndromally interrelated emotions.
3. These two types of testing cross validate each other as the relational variables are identified by two types of testing instruments.The relational operations identified by the inventory are illustrated by the projective tests. The tests identify the test taker’s relational modality abstractly and then concretely.
4. The battery is a self-assessment; the client constructs metaphors and interprets them following a structured questionnaire; s/he integrates them on a template to identify the personal conflict resolution process, one’s relational modality and how to modify one’s adjustment.
5. The battery is educational confirming the scientific and moral organization of the unconscious. It uses the constructs and formulas of the physics of the SHM by organizing the syndromal dialectic of emotions as a six emotions sequence: stress, response, anxiety, defense, reversal and compromise. The battery measures the physical dimensions of the unconscious conflict resolution process, the three formal or relational variables, and their physical dimensions, while it illustrates them in the symbolic language of the person.
6. The relational modality instrument is diagnostic. It uses the Kleinian group of four formal transformations and not isolated formal distinctions. These measure relational distinctions, which identify modalities as reciprocal to each other, subordinacy versus dominance, and as opposite to each other as antagonism versus cooperation, and as correlative to each other corresponding to alienation versus mutual respect, low versus high psychic tension.
7. The projective segment of the self-assessment is therapeutic as it represents an emotional experience. It leads the person to create a conflict resolution and then to personalize the pattern, to see it as metaphor of personal conflictual experiences, and to start rethinking how one deals with such responses. One draws insights about oneself and arrives at conclusions about how to make changes.
8. The information is delivered directly to the test taker to readily identify her relational modality. The clinical record is meaningful to the test taker without professional services; trained assistants’ knowledge can reinforce and clarify the personal impressions. The self-assessment being meaningful to the creator the test bypasses the need for an interpreter. The interpretation of the testing is very simple. A template integrates the artwork of the testing providing the personal pattern as an illustrated drama. We examine the power differential in every metaphor by pacing the heroes of stories on the concentric circles of a sociogram and identifying the cooperative versus antagonistic interactions with appropriate vectors within the circles.
9. The assessment is cost-effective. The interpretation of the CAB is relatively easy and simple. It is a self-assessment; the test taker generates the art and its interpretation leading to insights and changes without requiring professional services.
10. The assessment generates a valuable clinical record useful for the client and any observers, be that teachers or clinicians/therapists. The assessment represents a standardized valid and reliable clinical record that reflects the intellectual and emotional state of the client and her/his sociometric realities. The assessment is useful to the client, the therapist, the educator in the classroom, the coach in an organizational setting.
11. The tests are valid and reliable. Its statistical profile scores surpass by far existing tests’ validity and reliability ratings.
THE ONLINE DELIVERED SELF-ASSESSMENT GENERATES A USEFUL REPORT INCLUDING
The program generates a record combining item selections, drawings, writings, and reflections in the following seven tables:
Relational Modality Evaluation Scale, the Inventory Analysis Table.
The Creativity Exercises Table reconstructs the six-role process with the art work
Insight Table, groups the insights from four key creativity tasks.
Changes Table, groups suggestions for changes from the same tasks.
Self-Reflection Table about the learning experience.
Query Table presents the test takers evaluation off the three objectives of the assessment experience: didactic, diagnostic and therapeutic.
Transcription of the entire battery Table.
Contrasting The Conflict Analysis Battery with Traditional Assessments
In contrast to widely used instruments, it is a theory based self-assessment that helps the test taker to identify both her/his relational modality and its syndromal unfolding manifested as the orderly six-role states bound into a dramatic continuum.
Current psychological diagnostic instruments identify traits, which do not explain psychodynamically the pathogenetic origin of symptoms or serve a therapeutic function for the test taker. The CAB identifies patterns and also generates insights and directives for changes.
The focus on unrelated traits is exemplified with the statistical analysis of all assessments identifying five factors of personality held together not relationally but simply with acronyms; one of them is OCEAN for the five factors of statistical analysis of the assessment. The letters correspond to Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Formal Theory’s Conflict Analysis Battery identifies patterns whereas traditional psychological assessments identify traits.The Battery’s diagnostic entities, the relational modalities and the psychic tension, are equivalent to the OCEAN five factors of unrelated clusters of traits. The difference is that four of the factors correspond to the four interrelated relational modalities, while the fifth factor identifies neuroticism corresponding to the psychic tension scale.
· Openness corresponds to the dominant cooperative relational modality
· Conscientiousness to the submissive antagonistic relational modality
· Extraversion to the dominant antagonistic modality
· Agreeableness to the submissive cooperative relational modality
· Neuroticism corresponds to the psychic tension scale.
CONTRASTING CAB AS A DIAGNOSTIC AND THERAPEUTIC ASSESSMENT VERSUS CBT AS A NON PSYCHODYNAMIC AND NON-DIAGNOSTIC THERAPY
The Conflict Analysis Battery,CAB,is not only an assessment. It is a therapeutic modality. Therapy defined as becoming conscious of the unconscious the CAB self-assessment leads the test taker to identify the unconscious and modify its essence, hense it is therapeutic. The personality inventory identifies the unconscious as relational modalities and the set of projective techniques as a syndromal conflict resolving entity. The assessment informs about the unconscious but also transforms the pattern. It integrates emotions and behaviors leading to self-awareness, emotional release and emotional and attitudinal modification. Thus it is not only an intellectual controls instrument like CBT but an emotional experience that is transformative and therapeutic. As such we may contrast the CAB’s qualities to the CBT, a manualized approach of self-discovery targeting therapeutic changes.
CBT’s focus is cognitive, as self-awareness of behavioral responses, an intellectual experience. It consists of manual driven writing exercises monitoring the frequency of episodes of pathology, triggers, and the use of medications. CAB’s focus is self-awareness with emotional growth. The online and the manual driven assessment consist of a battery combining two types of tests: A personality inventory identifying one’s relational modality diagnosis with a set of projective tasks measuring the modality’s syndromal psychodynamic organization as a conflict resolving process. The metaphor creation projective tasks identify the six interrelated emotions: stress, response, anxiety, defense, reversal and compromise integrated into an overarching conflict resolution need for inner and outer balance. The experience is intellectual, cognitive but also emotional and therapeutic. Below is the metaphor profile of the author of the Formal Theory and creator of the Conflict Analysis Battery therapeutic self-assessment. This mural on display at the Museum’s Sanctuary of the creative process explains my personal conflict generated by my personal experience of the Holocaust resolved by my seeking to understand the scientific nature of morality. The sequence was generated by my completing the battery and integrating the tests as a six role sequence that ends with the reconciliation of art and science, faith and reason. The judaic fiddler representing morality stands on the Greecian sanctuary representing reason. The sanctuary is surrounded by the flags of nations and religions as an embracing halo.
The six images validate the theoretical assumption of the conflict resolution function of the unconscious and of the battery’s effectiveness in illustrating the personal drama.
