You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A complex mood haunts this collection of thirteen papers that span almost thirty years of productive thought, from 1962 to the present. Part I, the personal introduction, is a discourse on the manifest and latent meanings of metapsychology in Freud's writings, and a section on Freud's cognitive style. Part II immerses us in the details of Freud's economic point of view, taking up the concept of bound v. free cathexis, going on to a review of Freud's biologic assumptions and their influence on his theories, and viewing Freud's concept of psychic energy against the background of vitalism and mechanism. Part III consists of a reconsideration of the dynamic point of view as applied to the theory of motivation. The four chapters of Part IV examine the structural point of view in terms of ego psychology, the problem of human freedom, the development of primary process and its present status. In Part V, Holt returns to the more general ground of psychoanalytic theory as a whole, asserting the death and transfiguration of metapsychology and examining the current status of psychoanalytic theory. In the final section, Part VI, Holt outlines the major philosophical assumptions extant, their root metaphors, and indicates a metaphysical system which he believes offers a more adequate foundation for future psychoanalytic theory than the pragmatism prevalent among those drawn to hermeneutics.
Freud is reappraised neither as a clinical observer nor as a therapist but, as the sub-title indicates, as a theory builder. One might reorganize the book, or one's reading of it, adopting the stance of an interested bystander familiar only with a common sense view of the philosophy of science.
Let's try. First our innocent would like to know what facts are to be explained, what uniformities have been found. Holt lucidly sets forth the clinical facts of psychoanalytic observation in chapter 7. His inventory, which does not aim to be exhaustive, comprises thirteen or fourteen observati