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In my review in the “Psychoanalytic Quarterly” of Edoardo Weiss's monograph on agoraphobia, I addressed myself directly to some of its component elements including aspects of anxiety and of the ego. Here I wish to discuss some implications of Weiss's contribution for our psychoanalytic metapsychology.
His base of operation, the special dimension he emphasizes, is the economic level; more precisely, the economic variations within the cathexis of the ego. In practice the economic plane which deals with the quantities of energy is frequently considered jointly with the topographic plane which deals with the qualities of energy. Both of these levels stand in a more direct relation to the clinical phenomenology than do the structural-dynamic levels which encompass the theoretical concepts.
Weiss's orientation has special significance at this time because it can serve as a corrective against a current tendency to employ, somewhat imperialistically, the structural-dynamic levels beyond their legitimate scope. One effect of this tendency is the lessened utilization of the economic-topographic levels with a resultant constriction of insight, as I will attempt to demonstrate. Perhaps such a developmental phase is the fate of all scientific theories which undergo vicissitudes of expansion, contraction, distortion, reconstruction, replacement, etc.
Our psychoanalytic metapsychology is, I believe, an excellent example of Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. He stated that when a complex of phenomena is observed by means of two or more instruments, one gets two or more sets of findings, each finding having a relation to the others in the same set but not to those in the other set. The sets are mutually exclusive. As our definitions of the various metapsychologic levels determine our instruments, they invoke this law of mutual exclusiveness: one level cannot be equated with another.
Weiss has shown that anxiety in the agora is the reaction to the ill-feeling stemming from altera