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Readers of Neuropsychoanalysis may have noticed that Freudian metapsychology appears to be alive and well. In this issue, we are pleased to publish two very stimulating neuro-metapsychological papers: one that makes a significant contribution to the ongoing development of Freudian ideas, and one which charts a path to doing the same with Lacan.
In his 1981 paper “Does metapsychology still exist?,” Arnold Modell regards metapsychology as referring to psychological phenomena of the highest generalizability – universal to the human species and thereby close to biological bedrock. Seen by Modell as a modeling device or an experiment in thinking, metapsychology provides the space where the “subjective” meets the “objective,” where the empathic identifier meets the naturalistic observer. From the beginning, Freud’s metapsychology of the mental apparatus drew from both the subjective and the objective, and was a conception of the mind that was informed by ideas about the brain – for example, Freud’s ideas in Chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) is derived not just from the transformation of the explicitly neurologically-based Project (Solms & Saling, 1996), but also from his clinical experience. It is the product of a creative collision of careful listening to exquisitely individualistic and sometimes idiosyncratic utterances of patients with the understanding of the biological imperatives of human nature. In its foundation, therefore, metapsychology epitomizes the marriage of idiographic and nomothetic perspectives, a kind of double vision. The concept of the wish, for example, emerges not just from consideration of the infinite individual varieties of human desire, but also their grounding in the forces of self and species preservation. Today, our understanding of the wish is enriched by our knowledge of its relationship to the SEEKING system (Schonbachler, Stojkovic, & Boothe, 2016) and the evolutionary biology of REM sleep (Fisher & Kessler, 2018). Freud’s m