Action: Its Place in Psychoanalytic Interpretation and Theory

The theoretical advances of recent years have made it both possible and legitimate to question the proposition, binding on psychoanalysts for so long, that being a Freudian analyst means adhering faithfully to the fundamental assumptions and concepts of Freud's metapsychology. We are now in an early phase of the revision of these fundamental assumptions. This revision is unlike those attempted during earlier phases of the development of psychoanalysis, in that it entails no discarding or devaluing of Freud's clinical methods and the findings amassed by means of this method. My basis for making this claim is the slow, steady increase in the Freudian literature of the number of discussions which not only present fundamental critiques of metapsychology but go on to outline or at least point to new modes of conceptualization. These new modes have often centered on the concepts experience, meaning, choice (or decision), intention, and reasons, and they derive at least some of their stimulation from the writings of modern phenomenologists and existential analysts. I mention all this not as a prelude to a critical review of these developments but as a way of placing this paper in its correct historical context.1