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In many empirical sciences two principal parts can be recognized. One part consists of a body of statements describing the observed phenomena, the descriptions that lend themselves to empirical validation. The interconnexions in this matrix of statements are studied in something that is called a theoretical superstructure. Here the statements represent an outflow of the investigator's scientific imagination and are not subject to empirical investigations. They form anyhow an important part of what we feel to be our knowledge of the world. In advanced sciences quite often many different superstructures are applied to more or less similar descriptions, for instance in physics. This is generally regarded as an advantage. Psychoanalysis also has at least two superstructures designed to explain, causally connect, and predict various descriptions. One of these superstructures forms part of psycho-analytic psychology proper. The other is called psychoanalytic metapsychology (see Rapaport and Gill, 1959). The two superstructures are essentially parallel: they do not contradict each other, but we get a feeling of increased knowledge when we have been able to apply both of them adequately to a matrix of descriptions.
The present-day superstructures in psychoanalysis that are used to explain the descriptions of affects and anxiety can be pieced together from various authors (see Fenichel, 1939), (1941), (1945), (Freud, 1905), (1915–17), (1920), (1923), (1926), 1952; (Hartmann, 1939), (1950), (1952), (1955); (Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, 1946), (1949), (Kris, 1938); (Rapaport, 1953), (1960); (Schur, 1953), (1958) and will here be presented in a very simplified form. In the id, quantities of psychic energy are freely movable, and are probably of two kinds, libidinous and aggressive. These qualities of energy are, however, not to be thought of as mere scalars; it is meaningful also to talk about their direction, that is, they are vectors and are called psychologic