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METAPSYCHOLOGY IS LEADING a rather precarious existence these days. Over the last score of years, metapsychology has come under increasingly insistent and forceful attack that has placed its role in psychoanalytic thinking in considerable jeopardy. I shall review the major criticisms in this multifaceted attack on metapsychology and then examine some aspects of the place of metapsychology in psychoanalytic thinking. My purpose is not so much to launch a rebuttal of the critics of psychoanalytic metapsychology, but rather to put the debate about metapsychology into clearer perspective so that thoughtful reflection on the merits and demerits of both metapsychology and of the criticisms of it can be facilitated. It is my persuasion that a working-through and integration of these various perspectives and the correlative emphases they provide can only serve to advance psychoanalytic understanding.
The criticisms of psychoanalytic metapsychology have come from a number of perspectives and have focused on a variety of aspects of metapsychology in its role as the theory of psychoanalysis. I shall focus on three primary dimensions of this reassessment, which seem to me to have particular pertinence for focusing the central issues in this debate: (1) the attack on the biological assumptions underlying Freudian and psychoanalytic thinking, (2) the attack on the method of psychoanalytic theorizing, and (3) the questions that have been raised regarding the nature of psychoanalytic theory.
The exploration of the biological underpinnings of Freud's