Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

DISCUSSION: Dr. Benjamin Rubinstein stated that Freud had assumed brain function to be highly relevant to mental functioning. A consequence of this assumption has not been sufficiently appreciated, namely, that for a metapsychological hypothesis to be accepted as a causal explanation it must have two simultaneous sets of meanings: one to describe clinically recognized psychological relationships, and the other to describe neurophysiological relationships. Where both descriptions stem from the same metapsychological hypothesis, the neurophysiological description can be taken as a causal explanation of the psychological data. If not, the metapsychological hypothesis fails. A case in point is the concept of psychic energy. Dr. Rubinstein agrees that psychic energy is inherently vitalistic. However, he disagrees that the ego is necessarily a vitalistic concept. He wondered just how much is explained by utilizing the steady-state system as a model for such complex relationships as, for instance, that of mother and child. One cannot explain motivation or fantasy according to a neurophysiological model when our current ignorance of neurophysiology is so great. Dr. Rubinstein found the replacement of the concept of a specific organizing agency by that of information processing to be highly illuminating, but he questioned its use in explaining the differences between primary and secondary thinking in the sleeping and waking states. He concurred with the author's broad approach and with his opinion that recent advances in biology and neurophysiology impose a need to modify our metapsychology.

Dr. Charles Brenner pointed out that it was only after Freud had abandoned his attempt to formulate a neurophysiological theory to account for psychological