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Freud's metapsychological speculation, his picture of the various forces and laws that go to make up the human psyche, constituted his answer to the question: What is man that he can be victimized by the symptoms of neurosis? His answer to the question contained, in his own words, “the existence of unconscious mental processes, the special mechanisms which they obey, and the instinctive propelling forces which are expressed by them.”3a Implicit in this list is the rigid determinism which Freud believed to obtain in the mental life in spite of our “deeply rooted belief in psychic freedom and choice,” a belief which he went on to note “is quite unscientific.”3b Although Freud stated that his psychoanalytic edifice was “in reality but a superstructure which … [would] have to be set on its organic foundation at some time or other,”3c I find it difficult to believe that Freud actually thought that such a reduction was possible. Be that as it may, the great advances in the theory of organic information processing do tend to make Freud's conceptual thrust toward the organic take on the aspect of a viable possibility.
The two philosophies of psychoanalysis with which this study primarily deals may be indebted to Freud's psychology; the thoughts of Thomas Szasz and Jean-Paul Sartre, however, are more often than not related to the main outlines of Freud's metapsychology by contradiction rather than by dependence. Both Szasz and Sartre deny the existence of unconscious mental processes as defined by Freud; they both take issue with essentially mechanistic or instinctual explanations of human thought and behavior as well as denying the determinism which these rejected factors would entail. In place of