A Presupposition of How I Work—The Distinction Between Psychology and Metapsychology in the Transformation of Hypnosis Into Psychoanalysis1

IN THIS PAPER, I discuss some unfortunately neglected aspects of the development of psychotherapeutic inquiry from hypnosis to early psychoanalysis. If we closely review those aspects from the vantage point of our current pluralism of perspectives on the inquiry and experience, they can throw new light on the distinction between the empirical and systematic psychology, on one hand, and the many different interpretive metapsychologies on the other. We may, thereby, strengthen the ground of the current foundation, and, also, clarify the possible, future direction for advances in our views of the relation between theory and practice.

There is little question about the original, therapeutic aims of hypnosis and of early psychoanalysis. For the main, original aims of those two procedures were, in fact, the same, i.e., first, from a dynamic, transformational point of view, to overcome the resistances caused by the unconscious repressions; and secondly, from a descriptive, observational point of view, to recover the lost memories interpreted to cause the pathological symptoms.

But those two procedures of psychotherapy fell under two, radically different sets of psychic conditions: that of hypnosis being constructed by means of directed inquiry into a trance state; and that of early psychoanalysis, by way of contrast, being constructed during the process of associative inquiry into a waking state.

And it was, of course, Freud (1915–1917) the synthesizer, who