Experience and Conduct

WE HAVE BEEN ATTEMPTING in a series of studies to transpose the central theoretical ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis into a metapsychology-free framework, a "psychoanalytic phenomenology, " which takes the representational world (Sandler & Rosenblatt 1962) as its principal construct and focus. These studies have been guided by the dual aim of preserving and clarifying and clarifying the seminal clinical insights embedded in (and frequently obscured by) classical metapsychology, and of recasting them in a form which makes possible an articulation and integration of the psychoanalytic system with other theoretical points of view.

To these ends, we have proposed that the following components constitute the necessary and sufficient ingredients for a clinically meaningful psychoanalytic psychology of the representational world: (1) the distinctive configurations of self and object which can be shown to pervade a person's experiences; (2) the developmental tasks (for example, differentiation and integration) which a developing person must negotiate in order to articulate and consolidate his representational world; and (3) the various conscious and unconscious purposes (for example, wish-fulfilling, self-guiding and self-punishing, adaptive, restitutive-reparative, and defensive purposes) that may be served by the representational configurations which are established in the course of a person's life cycle.

As distinct from metapsychology, psychoanalytic phenomenology does not postualate a theory of the nature of personality as an objective entity. Instead, it consists in a methodological system of interpretive principles to guide the study of meaning in human experience and conduct. As such, it aims to elucidate the nature, developmental vicissitudes, functional significance, and therapeutic transformations of the representational structures that permeate and unconsciously organize a person's subjective world.

In our earlier studies, we have explored the implications of t