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Why does Cordelia Schmidt-Hellerau think that psychoanalysis needs a formalized, consistent model of drive and structure theory? In other words, why does she think that metapsychology is vital to the future of psychoanalysis? To answer such questions is to encounter a basic contradiction: the view of science that mostly informed Freud's thinking has changed, but there is still no model of the psyche more comprehensive than his. Therefore, Schmidt-Hellerau urges us to “unleash the creative potential of the metapsychology,” though not to cling to it literally (p. 6).
Schmidt-Hellerau looks at two main strands of criticism in her comprehensive and fair-minded survey of the major objections to metapsychology. One says that, as a human science, psychoanalysis should free itself from reductive, mechanistic thinking and adopt the methods of the humanities. The other says that psychoanalysis should be purged of unacceptable metaphysical, anthropomorphic, metaphoric elements so that it can unite with biology, neurophysiology, information theory, and systems theory. The problem is that the metapsychology “contains and unites both positions” (p. 9), so that each side can justifiably claim to continue Freud's work, but without noticing the introduction of a “split” into the theory (p. 10).
In order to revise and renew metapsychology without such splitting, Schmidt-Hellerau extends Freud's idea of the drive as a concept on the boundary of the psychic and the somatic. It is only as a rigorously conceived boundary discipline that metapsychological thinking can avoid certain basic pitfalls. Any psychic phenomenon, she says, can be conceived in clinical terms (e.g., the Oedipus complex, compromise formation) or metapsychological ones (e.g., drives, defenses, notions of structure formation), but neither the clinical nor the metapsychological concepts