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Time was when everyone knew what was meant by the term structural theory. It meant ego, superego, and id. Anyone who talked about the id instead of the Ucs. and about the ego and the superego instead of the Cs.-Pcs. had given up Freud's earlier, topographic theory, as Freud recommended (Freud, 1923), and had replaced it with the newer, structural theory.
But life is not that simple nowadays. We no longer have just two theories to choose from. We have a spate of them and they all refer to ego, superego, and id. No one uses such old-fashioned terms as Ucs., Pcs., and Cs. any more. Today everyone talks about the ego, the superego, and even, occasionally, the id. It might be a structural theorist who is using such language, or an object relations theorist, or a follower of Mrs. Klein, or a self psychologist, or a developmentalist. All use the language of the structural theory from time to time and many do so most of the time, so it behooves me to say right at the start what I mean by structural theory.
Freud himself never thought of the structural theory as a separate, new theory that he had thought up and introduced to supersede its predecessor, the topographic theory. In fact that wasn't at all the relationship between the two theories. As Arlow and I pointed out some years ago (Arlow and Brenner, 1963), the topographic and the structural theories are much more like one another than either is like any other theory before or since about how the mind works. What Freud did in 1923 was this. He made some changes in the theories he had formulated up to that time, changes he believed were necessary in the light of his growing clinical experience. Some of them were major