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ARTICLE HISTORY Received 18 March 2022; Accepted 20 March 2022
Dr. Kernberg’s current contribution (Kernberg, 2021) is a welcome effort to re-examine and revise some fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique in light of emerging data from the cognitive and affective neurosciences, by one of today’s most distinguished psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinicians. This attempt is refreshing, since during the last fifty years, and perhaps even earlier, psychoanalysis all but ceased to formulate and discuss amendments to some of the basic tenets of its metapsychology.
Metapsychology, a term originally coined by Freud (1898a), came to mean the theory behind the theory - what Rapaport (1959; quoted in Erwin, 2002, p. 339) defined as “a fragmentary - yet consistent - general theory of psychoanalysis, which comprises the premises of the special (clinical) theory, the concepts built on it, and the generalizations derived from it … named metapsychology.”
Throughout the century since it was published, Freud’s structural, tripartite model of the mind (Freud, 1923) served, at times implicitly, as a common metapsychological basis for almost all discussions about theory and technique that have taken place among the psychoanalytic community, and within the main corpus of psychoanalytic literature.
Object relations theory, attachment theory, relational approaches, and self-psychology have all transformed and diversified many aspects of psychoanalytic technique, and have all made numerous contributions to psychoanalytic theories of motivation and development (Kernberg, 2001; Mitchell & Black, 1995). However, they have left some of Freud’s structural formulations of the mind essentially unaltered.
If metapsychology amounts to theories about the structure of the human mental apparatus on the one hand, and about the nature of the forces which act upon it, its inherent motivational systems, and its ontogenetic development, on the other hand, then psychoanalysis has made import