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The unanswered questions that loom largest in the history of psychoanalysis have always concerned the theoretical and the practical problems arising from the ubiquitous relation between psychology and metapsychology. Those problems still are, I think, the most complex and compelling in contemporary psychoanalytic inquiry, for they are, in clinical fact, simply unavoidable.
As a result of the long-term, original, and radically new research produced on this topic, an outstanding history of scientific and therapeutic accomplishment — coherent, integrated, and cumulative — has already been recorded. That record of accomplishment in large measure explains why it is necessary for us, once again, to reopen our views of the relation between psychology and metapsychology, and if we are to sustain the seminal, future promise of psychoanalytic knowledge in our own way, to reappraise them afresh today from within the substance of our own psychoanalytic experience.
In retrospect, still other unfortunately neglected aspects of that extraordinary record are, however, becoming increasingly apparent. For while those long-term research studies were undertaken mainly to explore the relation between psychology and metapsychology, as evidenced by the seemingly interminable dialogues, controversies, and convergences among the various schools,