Metapsychological Considerations on the Self

To attempt to consider the nature of the 'self' psychoanalytically has many implications, not only narrowly psychoanalytical, but also broadly philosophical—as Freud (1940) observed when he made the statement, 'The nature of the psychical apparatus must be reserved for philosophical reflection.' The lack of consideration of these broadly philosophical assumptions, the authors believe, has contributed to the steadily increasing deterioration of confidence in the value of psychoanalytic theory—at least on the level of metapsychology as contrasted with clinical theory. Indeed, George Klein (1966) has indicated that psychoanalysts would do better if they did not even attempt to build a basic theory of the nature of man, thus leaving psychoanalysis to its clinical and empirical observations. There have been other dissatisfactions with Freud's metapsychology as being primarily a now outmoded scientific worldview, the one characteristic of the late 19th century. Writers such as Holt (1967), Rosenblatt & Thickstun (1970) and, in particular, Yankelovich & Barrett (1970) have discussed the philosophy of science held as self-evident at the turn of the century. What seems to emerge from these writers' discussions is a picture of Freud's commitment to a theory of energies and forces as the ultimate explanation of human behaviour. As Yankelovich & Barrett (1970) point out, and as Schafer (1968a) also says in a different manner, there were two Freuds—one of whom dealt with his patient clinically, in terms of the meaning that a piece of behaviour (inner or outer) had for the patient, and another Freud who equated scientific explanations with forces and energies in the field of psychoanalysis, as in the mode of physics. This theory of forces and energies started as dissociated from the clinical data, which supposedly gave it life, and has become even more dissociated as clinical findings are less simply expressed and resistant of ready transformation into the mode of classica