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In a recent article, entitled “The Current Status of Psychoanalytic Theory,” Robert Holt (1985) proclaims Freud's metapsychology to be “virtually dead” and begins to recite an elegy, on behalf of the entire psychoanalytic community, for this object loss.
For a long time, I clung to the hope that if one could simply purge metapsychology of these stylistic defects it would prove to be not only helpful to the clinician but a fertile source of testable propositions for the experimenter and other systematic researchers in personality as well as clinical
Dr. Klein is a clinical supervisor in the APA internship program at Ulster County Community Mental Health Services and is also in private practice in Kingston, New York.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Nathan Adler and Rollo May for their encouragement and guidance, Leo Goldberger and the two anonymous editors of this journal for their comments and suggestions, and Leslie Glazer for his willingness to share his insight, and respect for dialectical philosophy.
Page 565psychology. But after a couple of decades spent in studying metapsychology and attempting to make it scientifically useful, I reluctantly concluded that the task was impossible.… I recognize the harshness of the above indictment, but do not make it lightly or with any pleasure. It is anything but a comforting reflection to realize that most of one's career has been devoted to as worthless a theory as metapsychology proved to be [p. 292].
Under the subtitle, “The Decline and Fall of Metapsychology,” Holt (1985) summarizes what he and his colleagues believe be the main reasons for the tragic death of Freud's metapsychology. He refers to the following list of antimetapsychological propositions as “the collective critique of metapsychology.”
The relationship between metapsychology and the clinical theory has not been clarified.
Concepts are poorly defined.
Concepts overlap one another partly or completely.