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I wonder whether Riker is familiar with the thinking of George S. Klein, whose work was published posthumously in 1976, a year before Kohut’s formal christening of self psychology and its bipolar self. Klein, like Kohut, was a psychoanalytic radical who had a major impact on my viewpoint.
Klein (1976) claimed that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories—a metapsychology and a clinical theory—deriving from two different universes of discourse. Freudian metapsychology deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Freudian clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual’s unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks “why” questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks “how” questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person’s experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited. Klein’s proposals for a radical theorectomy for psychoanalysis have significantly influenced such contemporary thinkers as Merton Gill, Roy Schafer, and those, including George Atwood and myself (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018), who have sought to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry.
Expanding on Klein’s distinction, I would characterize psychoanalytic clinical theory as emotional phenomenology and psychoanalytic metapsychology as a form of metaphysics, in that it