Psychology Versus Metapsychology: Psychoanalytic Essays in Memory of George S. Klein. Ed. by Merton M. Gill and Philip S. Holzman. Psychological Issues, Vol.  4, No. 4 (Monograph 36). New York:  International Universities Press, 1976.

To honor the memory of George S. Klein, the editors have gathered twelve papers that relate to one of Klein's central interests: “the disentangling of the two theories of psychoanalysis, the metapsychological, or mechanistic, and the psychological, or one of meaning” (p. 1). Klein was an advocate of “a commitment to psychological explanation in psychological terms, arguing that psychoanalytic metapsychology with its implicit neurological assumptions did not explain clinical theory, but lay in fact in a different realm of discourse” (p. 8).

Merton M. Gill, in “Metapsychology Is Not Psychology,” one of the essays in the book, elaborates the distinction between the two theories, then summarizes his conclusions as follows:

Metapsychological propositions are in the natural science framework of force, energy, and structure. Psychological propositions deal with intention and meaning. Although Freud's metapsychology was originally explicitly neurological, he later denied, sometimes explicitly, the continuing implicit neurobiological assumptions of psychoanalytic metapsychology. Metapsychological propositions are not an abstraction from psychological propositions, nor are they derivable from…such propositions. There is therefore no direct connection between psychology and metapsychology. A “pure” psychology based on data like that of the psychoanalytic situation is possible and can be a science that is valid in its own right. (p. 103)

A major reason the issue is important is noted by Gill:

A psychological concept must be erected on psychological grounds alone. Although either a psychological hypothesis or a neurological hypothesis can be a stimulus for searching for a correlate in the other discipline, the ever-present danger lurks of thinking one is on psychological grounds alone when one is using implicit neurological assumptions…. The connection between metapsychology and

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practice has long been ambiguous and uncertain…. The unbridled speculation that stems in part from the