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A jeremiad is a literary work in which the author, like the Old Testament prophet, bitterly laments the state of society. It often contains a prophecy that the end of something is near—in the present instance, the end of psychoanalysis. In The Crisis in Psychoanalysis, Ahmed Fayek concludes that the dire situation reflected in our present theoretical pluralism could have been forestalled had Freud (and we who came after) stuck to his original “classical model,” by which Fayek means the topographic hypothesis that mapped the systems ucs, pcs, and cs. He warns us sternly that the time remaining for us to remedy this error is running out. This appears to him to be a weltuntergangen danger. One of his principal arguments here is that Freud never properly understood the difference between functional and structural entities, and that his abandonment of the system ucs was unwarranted. Functional entities are a conceptual dead end, but structural entities capture the essence of the system ucs, for Fayek Freud's most profound insight into the human mind. Thus, he concludes that Freud's 1923 monograph The Ego and the Id has proven to be a fateful blunder. He calls the structural hypothesis that Freud introduced in that monograph the “replacement” topography, fatally flawed because it omits the system ucs.
Fayek has reached these conclusions on the basis of his own deductive examination of Freud's reasoning, conducted from a logical-philosophical perspective; on this basis he repeatedly describes Freud's 1923 proposals