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There is a good deal of confusion on the question of what metapsychology is. Marie Jahoda (1977, p. 93) has summed it up admirably:
according to Jones [1955, p. 185] it implies “a comprehensive description of any mental process,” while David Rapaport [Rapaport and Gill, 1959, pp. 795-796] reads it to mean “the study of the assumptions upon which the system of psychoanalytic theory is based”; in another publication [1960], however, he identified metapsychology as the “principles in psychoanalytic theory.” Hartmann [1964, p. 328], who apparently felt uneasy about the term, defines it as theory on the highest level of abstraction. Strachey [1957, p. 105], in the editorial introduction to the papers on metapsychology, uses the slightly odd phrase “views on psychological theory” to characterise metapsychology, obviously implying something different from the theory itself. Hilgard [1962] seems to suggest that metapsychology is a collection of Freud's models of man, and Laplanche and Pontalis [1973, p. 249] say that “metapsychology constructs an ensemble of conceptual models which are more or less far-removed from empirical reality.”
To this collection let me add only Gill's (1976) assertion that “Metapsychology is not psychology” but biology, and one more definition: “Metapsychology is a generic term which subsumes any extraclinical theory including Freud's specific metapsychology” (Rubinstein, personal communication), apparently the sense in which it is used by Smith (1981)
In another paper (Holt, 1981a), I have discussed the contemporary interpretations