other people's issues rather than because of his.

Charlie Gordon's primary internal conflict concerns his struggle to become intelligent in order to assimilate into society as a typical, accepted individual. As an intellectually disabled man, Charlie struggles his entire to life to be accepted by his family members and peers. Charlie's struggle to gain acceptance is expressed through his desire to become intelligent.

Charlie reasons that if he were to become intelligent, he would gain admiration and respect from his family and peers. He demonstrates incredible ambition and work ethic as a mentally disabled man to increase his intelligence and even learns how to read after taking classes at the Beekman College Center. Charlie also hopes that the experimental operation will dramatically increase his intelligence, which will allow him to assimilate into society and be accepted by others.

Tragically, Charlie's operation leads to another significant internal conflict as he struggles with his traumatic past. After Charlie becomes a genius, he further alienates himself from his peers and society as he continues to deal with his acceptance issues. It is only after Charlie reaches his peak intelligence and grows emotionally that he is able to overcome his internal struggle to gain others' approval. Charlie finally gains self-assurance and embraces his past before he regresses back to a mentally disabled man.

Charlie's primary internal struggle indicates that he is having issues with self-image, self-worth, and perhaps self-esteem. In his effort to be "like" others and to seek friends through obtaining some level of normalcy, Charlie reveals his own insecurities. He shows that he feels outcast and negatively different from the world around him, despite his revelation and response toward the end of this story.

He serves almost as a poster child for any modern-day adolescent wrestling with their own issues of image, value, and popularity in the above described sense.

Charlie struggles so much with a need to be accepted and to be "normal".  He spent his childhood being abused by his mother because he was different and she couldn't face it.  As an adult, he hates that he is not equal to his "friends" and peers.  He wants the surgery because he wants to:

to be smart like other pepul so I can have lots of friends who like me.

Like all humans, he just wants to be a part of a group.  However, when he is "smart" enough to understand what his peers are really like, Charlie starts to understand that being accepted isn't necessarily a positive goal.  Why desire to be accepted by people who aren't humane in their treatment of others?  However, he still desires to be "like others" and tries desparately to research and discover the flaw in the operation.  It is only when he realizes that there is no fix that he must face up to his internal problem.  It is then that Charlie overcomes his conflict and accepts himself and understands that other people will and this is enough.  He also learns from his own internal conflict to be accepting of other people who might be:

not so smart like you once thot they were.

Flowers for Algernon is about a developmentally disabled man named Charlie Gordon who undergoes a surgical procedure to increase his conventional intelligence. A mouse named Algernon has already undergone this procedure and has increased its intelligence. The internal conflict that results from the surgery, which makes Charlie into a conventionally "smart" person, is that he loses touch with his previous life and becomes more aware of his painful connections with other people.

For example, as Charlie gets conventionally smarter, he realizes that his co-workers at the factory he works at were mainly interested in making fun of him. In the letters that make up the novel, he writes, "I'm still a little angry that all the time people were laughing and making fun of me because I wasn't so smart." Eventually, he is fired from the factory because, as one of his former co-workers tells him, "It was evil when Eve listened to the snake and ate from the tree of knowledge." Charlie's co-workers feel left behind and offended when he becomes so much more intelligent. In addition, Charlie begins to develop a relationship with his teacher, Miss Kinnian, but when he becomes very advanced, he no longer has much in common with her.

Eventually, Charlie's intelligence declines, as the effects of the operation are not permanent, and Algernon, the mouse, dies. Charlie finds that he can't really connect with the people he was formerly friends with, including his co-workers at the factory and Miss Kinnian, and he decides to leave New York and go elsewhere to start a new life. 

In harmony with the above comments, Charlie struggled with fitting in: when he lacked intelligence he always allowed things to happen to himself in order to amuse Joe, Frank, et al and as his intelligence increased he had trouble fitting in with those who weren't as smart as he had become especially Ms. Kinnian because he would talk about concertos, math, and many languages and those less intelligent people were unable to comprehend. So on both ends of the spectrum Charlie struggled with acceptance.

Another external conflict that Charlie had to deal with was his relationships with the people at work.  At the beginning of the story, they are cruel to Charlie and take advantage of him to amuse themselves.  Later as his intelligence level grows he realizes their cruelty and their relationship begins to change.  As he reaches the height of his intelligence, they begin to fear him and try to get hm fired.  Only one does not sign and she sees that something is not right with Charlie and wants him to return to the "good simple man" he was.  Later when he is losing his intelligence and goes back to work in the bakery, the workers accept him back and are kinder to him than they were before.  Charlie has also come to terms with their making fun of them remembering that they were never as intelligent as he once was.

Charlie has to withstand abuse by his mother as a child. She at first wouldn't accept that he had limited intelligence, and when she finally did, she was afraid he'd hurt his sister. As an adult, Charlie has to deal with the people who make fun of him and abuse him. Even before his operation, Charlie knows who is kind to him and who isn't. He mainly wants people to treat him like a human being, no matter what.

I'm not sure what you are asking. An internal conflict is one that a character has within himself. So an internal conflict would be one that Charlie has to deal with himself, such as his struggle against his loneliness. Perhaps you mean an external conflict that Charlie has with someone else or something else in the story. One external conflict he has is trying to fit in society. He still doesn't fit in even after he becomes a genius, and he's still lonely.