The Denouement of Metapsychology

I once had a philosophy professor named Anderson who said everything twice, so we called him “Anderson-Anderson.” We used to think of him as just a funny character, but I realize now that he said everything twice-twice because he was trying to drum some very important ideas into us.

I remember particularly the day he lit into a student who was trying to prove that the world could be reduced to mathematical formulae. ‘Those aren't numbers-numbers out there,” Professor Anderson rumbled. “Those are people-people. Those are people out there!”

John David Stein9

Such humanistic ideas remind me of my own concerns when I hear reference to disembodied egos, cathexes, objects, and other of our psychoanalytic theoretical terms. But humanistic concerns are not enough, and it now seems true that there is an intellectual tiger loose in our midst-a tiger that seems sure to disarrange our tidy metapsychology.

In recent years there has been a rising chorus of voices arguing that our psychoanalytic metapsychology suffers from irremedial factual and logical defects and that it should now be dispensed with.1,3,6,8 Although there has been protest against these critiques, the bulk of psychoanalytic writings has simply ignored these cogent arguments, even though the contributors are among the most respected of Freudian theoreticians.

When these issues are discussed at scientific meetings, great interest is aroused. Nevertheless, the majority of psychoanalytic commentators are troubled, if not shocked, that psychoanalytic metapsychology should be seriously questioned. Some seem to advocate, in violation of the spirit of scientific discussion, that it is an outrage that such questions should even be raised. More important, however, are other concerns-for example, that such thinking may induce psychoanalysis to become an existentialist, voluntaristic endeavor, an outcome that they consider undesirable and unscientific. Furthermore, say some of these defenders of metapsychology, would