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From The Beginning of his psychoanalytic work, Freud endeavoured to construct a general psychological theory which would make the psyche understandable in terms of the natural and biological sciences of his era. This general theory, referred to in psychoanalytic circles as Freud's metapsychology, composes the highest level of abstraction and integration within psychoanalytic theory. Its basic assumptions have to do with biological forces, energies and structures, and rely on a physicalistic model of the psyche. These ideas, which can be traced back to Freud's publication in 1895 of the Project for a Scientific Psychology, persisted in his various reworkings of his general theory with only minor changes in terminology throughout his life.
During the past decade a series of publications has appeared in the psychoanalytic literature addressing the problems created by Freud's lifelong adherence to his neurological and biological assumptions (GILL 2, GILL and HOLZMAN 3, KLEIN 11, MEISSNER 15). A growing number of present-day psychoanalysts have endeavoured to free psychoanalysis from what they consider to be the encumbrance of Freud's metapsychological views and their perpetuation by many of his followers (GILL 2, HOLT 7, KLEIN 11).
These authors express the need for a differentiation between the metapsychological and the clinical theory, believing that these are, or can be, very separate entities which, though closely interwoven, have different origins and different purposes, and are, in many ways,
This paper is a shortened version of the longer paper, ‘Developments in the psychoanalytic concept of the self: a Jungian view’, published in Quadrant, Vol. 18, No. 1, Spring 1985.