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Ms Siquier opened the panel by noting the importance of the topic to be discussed. Today, she said, there is a growing interest in questions of epistemology and in interdisciplinary studies so that the present panel is quite relevant to current concerns in our field.
Dr Patricia Kitcher then presented her paper, ‘A defence of Freud's metapsychology’. Her effort in this paper, she stated, was to save at least some of Freud from the Freudians, and to defend metapsychology against analysts who view it as irrelevant and unnecessary. In addition, she sought to defend metapsychology ‘against epistemologists who regard it as unsound, as unempirical’.
Emphasising the fact that for Freud, metapsychology was a research ideal and that he believed that a comprehensive understanding of mental phenomena required describing a psychological process in ‘its dynamic, topographical and economic aspects’ (Freud, 1915, p. 181), Dr Kitcher divided her defence into three sections, corresponding to the three aspects of metapsychology.
Freud's basic aim in creating psychoanalysis, Kitcher pointed out, was to explain behaviour produced by unconscious motivation. He extended the range of ordinary psychological explanation, she added, ‘by extending the range of desires and beliefs that could rationalise the actions they caused’. In addition, he altered psychological explanation by proposing that the factors that make actions intelligible were themselves produced or transformed by previously unrecognised forces that acted upon them. The introduction of these forces allowed Freud to relate psychoanalytic explanation to ordinary psychological explanation because these forces explained how such odd beliefs and desires were produced from the more familiar stock of human ideas.
In Kitcher's view, ‘Freud intended the dynamic part of psychoanalysis to include descriptions of the unobserved, proximate cause of behaviour—ideas including beliefs and desires—and the forces that act on them’. Thus, she