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Depending on where you stand regarding the theoretical status of psychoanalysis, the publication of an Introduction to metapsychology at the beginning of the twenty-first century may appear to you as either a nostalgic celebration of a distant past or, on the contrary, a gesture truly consistent with the fundamentals of the current psychoanalytic endeavour. Needless to say, Antonio Alberto Semi's idea of metapsychology rests on the latter premise.
More than two decades ago Arnold Modell published a paper asking, ‘Does metapsychology still exist?’ (1981), in which he reviewed and discussed the many attacks on metapsychological thinking in psychoanalysis that, at the time, already culminated in the outright rejection of metapsychology as a whole. In its defence Modell noted that metapsychology covered at least three distinct functions:
One, a generalization of those psychological processes that are species specific [i.e. specific to human beings—author's note]; two, an explicit enunciation of those assumptions that underlie psychoanalytic theory, including assumptions from neighbouring disciplines, such as biology; and three, a modelling device which is in the nature of a thought experiment, an imaginary entity that brings a measure of order to the primary data but does not correspond directly to the data (p. 393).
To those who deemed it outdated, Modell replied,
It is otiose to claim that metapsychology should be discarded as it reflects Freud's now outmoded philosophy of science. That we take for granted. One does not for this reason discard metapsychology but one must revise the epistemological assumptions of metapsychology so that it is in accord with our current outlook (p. 393).
I think Modell was essentially right. I should, however, underscore that for the revision of metapsychology to occur, we must have not only the current philosophical and scientific outlook but also a thorough knowledge of the theory under revision. Unfortunately, metapsychology became less an