Internalization of Conflict

Internalization of Conflict names the structural shift whereby the mythic opposition between external divine or cosmic forces — figured in the Homeric epic as the antagonism between Apollo and Dionysos — is re-posed, in Greek tragedy, as a conflict that plays out within the very psyche of the protagonist. The move is not merely a literary-historical transition but a structural one in the Lacanian sense: what was previously distributed across rival agencies in the external world (gods, fate, opposing armies) is now concentrated inside the subject, splitting it from within. For Boothby's reading of Lacan, this internalization is precisely what makes tragedy — and paradigmatically the Oedipus myth — the privileged site for psychoanalytic insight. The tragic hero does not simply battle an outside adversary; the protagonist is constitutively divided against itself, enacting a drama of unknowing in which the subject's desire and its destruction converge.

This internalization is theoretically homologous with Lacan's account of subjective destitution — the mortifying rupture of the imaginary ego's coherent self-image. When conflict moves inside the subject, the imaginary totalizing image of the self (the ideal ego, i(a)) can no longer hold; the subject is split, and the Real of desire breaks through the Symbolic-Imaginary armour of the ego. The tragic protagonist thus enacts at the level of dramatic form what analysis aims to produce at the level of the cure: a confrontation with the knowledge one does not know one has, a destabilization of the ego's méconnaissance in favour of the subject's encounter with its desire.

The concept appears in diaeresis-richard-boothby-embracing-the-void-rethinking-the-origin-of-the-sacred (p.103) and functions as a literary-structural argument in support of Lacan's broader claim that tragedy — and Oedipus in particular — is the royal road to the subject's encounter with its own desire and unknowing. Internalization of Conflict is an extension and specification of several canonical Lacanian concepts simultaneously. It specifies the Imaginary register: the external conflict of the epic corresponds to imaginary dyadic rivalry (the a–a' axis), whereas the internalized conflict of tragedy corresponds to the Imaginary's collapse under the pressure of the Real. It specifies the Ego: the coherent heroic ego of Homeric narrative gives way to a protagonist whose ideal ego is shattered by precisely the knowledge it cannot avow — what the Knowledge synthesis identifies as le savoir qui ne se sait pas. The tragic structure is thus where Desire in the Lacanian sense becomes visible: desire is no longer projected onto divine forces but revealed as an internal, irreducible lack circling around the lost object.

Internalization of Conflict also cross-references the Oedipus Complex (which Lacan re-reads as precisely the drama of splitting — the Splitting of the Subject — produced by the signifier's castrating entry) and the Real (that which breaks through the Imaginary coherence of the epic hero's world and forces the tragic hero's subjective destitution). As an isolated concept, it serves as the literary-theoretical hinge through which Boothby aligns the history of Greek poetics with the Lacanian topology of the subject: tragedy's formal achievement is to have given dramatic body to the subject's constitutive internal division.

Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the SacredRichard Boothby · 2023 (p.103)

the epic conflict between the forces of Apollo and Dionysos with which the Homeric heroes contended is later reposed in tragedy as conflicting currents internal to the protagonists themselves.

The phrase "reposed in tragedy as conflicting currents internal to the protagonists themselves" is theoretically loaded because "reposed" signals a structural re-inscription rather than mere narrative evolution, and "conflicting currents internal to the protagonists" marks the precise site of Lacanian Splitting of the Subject — the moment when exteriority (Apollo vs. Dionysos as rival cosmic agencies) is folded into an intra-psychic topology, making the subject itself the battlefield of forces it neither masters nor fully knows.