Psychoanalysis without Psychodynamics

It is paradoxically not what is actually to be heard that makes music difficult, but what cannot be heard because it is not there. It is the lack of something which the listener expects to hear but which is refused him that makes his blood boil … Every original work represents an omission, even a deliberate erasure of what was previously indispensible to art as well as new ordering and new elements. The real irritant for the listener is that what he has so far considered essential to a work of music he now cannot perceive. The composer has left it out. The appreciation of a new style is as much an effort of renunciation as of acceptance. CHARLES ROSEN (1973).

It is time to stop using the mixed physicochemical and biological language of Freudian metapsychology. This is the language of force, energy, cathexis, mechanism and sublimation combined with the language of function, structure, drive, object, and adaptation. By now this eclectic language has been criticized so extensively in the Freudian theoretical literature that it would be too much to attempt to repeat here the many and various cogent arguments that have been advanced against it. I must hope that you are familiar with the metapsychological critiques I mean, such as those by Home (1966), Rycroft (1966), (1968), Guntrip (1967), Holt (1967), myself (Schafer 1968, esp. ch. 3), (1973a), George Klein (1969), Grossman & Simon (1969), Hayman (1969) and Leites (1971). Additionally, I must hope that on this basis you are prepared to entertain further extensions of the argument. We can no longer afford to maintain unchallenged the belief that there can be no Freudian psychoanalysis without Freudian metapsychology.

We shall, however, be disappointed if we stop using this language, trusting that some fortunate combination of clear thinking, common sense, clinical experience, humanistic sentiments and judicious selection of key concepts, such as self or intention or relationship, will constitute a sound basis fo