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A century ago, Freud formulated a model of the psychical apparatus, the metapsychology, that accounted for pathology and its repair in treatment in terms of changes in mental and emotional structures. In developing an abstract theoretical model as a heuristic for investigation of inner experience, including unconscious as well as conscious representations, Freud's approach was indeed the “scientific novelty” he claimed (Freud 1940, 145), and presaged the strategy of model building in cognitive psychology today.
The potential scientific power of an abstract model lies in its capacity for opening new directions for investigation. The explanatory framework provides a basis for guiding observation, the observations feed back to enable continuing revision and elaboration of the model (Bucci 1997a). This potential has, however, not been realized for the metapsychology. The basic theoretical structure of energy distribution in a closed system has not proven to be an effective heuristic for investigating mental and emotional functions, and many analysts have sought to dissociate their clinical observations from that framework (Rapaport 1959, Klein 1973). Nevertheless, as Holt (1985) points out, the concepts of the clinical theory remain embedded in the metapsychology. Basic psychoanalytic concepts such as repression, the unconscious, resistance, transference, structural change, and the primary and secondary processes of thought are understood, implicitly or explicitly, in the context of the metapsychology, or left undefined, this is the “crisis of theory” of which Thomae and Kaechele (1987) write.
As I have argued elsewhere, it is not possible to investigate psychical structure without an explanatory theoretical framework (Bucci 1997a).