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Metapsychology, Colby points out, uses Freud's tripartite structural model of id, ego, and superego and no fresh structural system has
been proposed. While admitting its clinical usefulness, he points out that the tripartite model 'lacks the complexity and refinement so endearing to the pure theoretician'. In this book the author is concerned only with the theoretical aspects of psychoanalysis.
In Colby's consideration of the postulate of psychic energy, he notes that Breuer and Freud offered no definition of psychic energy in a psychological language; they borrowed their concepts from electrophysics, and thought of psychic energy in terms of electric currents. But, says Colby, 'energy' is not mechanical, thermal, chemical, or electrical. Indeed, he says, it is possible that we have no right to speak of energy at all. Today's physicist is cautious in saying what it is. Because the earlier analysts thought in terms of the physics of their time the psychic apparatus was thought of in terms of a hydraulic metaphor: a series of pipes and passageways, a vast conduit system through which instinctual energies underwent various vicissitudes but remained the same except for their location.
Qualified by his knowledge of modern physics Colby makes a provocative attempt to revise these two postulates in the light of modern scientific conceptions. Instead of the tripartite model he proposes a 'cyclic circular structural model' which 'represents the scientific ideas and images of our time'. This hypothetical cyclic model, he emphasizes, has a convenience and usefulness not for all psychoanalytic theory 'but only for the logical and metapsychological interrelating of basic postulates of psychic energy and structure'.
The text of this highly compressed treatise contains many illustrations having to do with his 'cyclic circular structural model' which in their complexity are as much in advance of the old tripartite model as the engine of today's car is in advance of the old