Serviceable and Consistent: The Goal of Metapsychology

(Accepted for publication 27 September 2015)

We have often heard it maintained that sciences should be built up on clear and sharply defined basic concepts. In actual fact no science, not even the most exact, begins with such definitions. The true beginning of scientific activity consists rather in describing phenomena and then in proceeding to group, classify and correlate them. Even at the stage of description it is not possible to avoid applying certain abstract ideas to the material in hand, ideas derived from somewhere or other but certainly not from the new observations alone. Such ideas - which will later become the basic concepts of the science - … must at first necessarily possess some degree of indefiniteness; … we come to an understanding about their meaning by making repeated references to the material of observation from which they appear to have been derived, but upon which, in fact, they have been imposed…. It is only after more thorough investigation of the field of observation that we are able to formulate its basic scientific concepts with increased precision, and progressively so to modify them that they become serviceable and consistent over a wide area. Then, indeed, the time may have come to confine them in definitions. The advance of knowledge, however, does not tolerate any rigidity even in definitions. Physics furnishes an excellent illustration of the way in which even ‘basic concepts' that have been established in the form of definitions are constantly being altered in their content.

As these introductory remarks into Instincts and their vicissitudes (a paper on drives and their defenses) show, Freud was perfectly clear about how the science he was developing over the span of four decades would come into being. First the clinical observation; then the organization of the empirical data on a more abstract (from the individual case removed) level with the help of general ideas; and finally the definition of basic concepts