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Honoring George Klein (), this volume focuses on his last preoccupation—the differentiation of metapsychological theory and psychological theory. It includes Klein's “Freud's Two Theories of Sexuality,” Merton M. Gill's “Metapsychology Is Not Psychology,” Robert R. Holt's “Drive or Wish? A Reconsideration of the Psychoanalytlc Theory of Motivation,” Robert S. Wallerstein's “Psychoanalysis as a Science: Its Present Status and Its Future Tasks,” and Benjamin B. Rubinstein's “On the Possibility of a Strictly Clinical Psychoanalytic Theory: An Essay in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.” The volume is extremely valuable in clarifying metapsychological theory and its limitation and benefits.
There is no unanimity, even in this volume, on what metapsychology is. From one perspective, it is seen as theory concerning the material substrate of the psychological, that is, the neurological and biological. Gill tries to show in detail that wherever Freud spoke of metapsychology he was concerned with a natural science framework of structure, energy, and force. Klein sees the sexual instinct theory as quasi-physiological and as reducing pleasure to the discharge of tension from the sexual drive. Holt agrees:
A large part of what we know as the theory of instincts, including the concept of instinct or drive itself, is part of metapsychology and not of the clinical theory.
From a second perspective, metapsychology is seen as not being concerned with the natural sciences but rather with abstractions or generalizations of clinical data. Wallerstein states that metapsychology attempts to answer “how?” questions—it attempts to explain how phenomena occur—and Rubinstein concurs that a general theory is possible.
Clinical, or psychological, theory refers to the hypotheses the analyst makes and uses in the therapy session. Here, what is of concern is meaning. Klein shows how the analyst is interested in the values and meanings attached to sensual experience, while Gill emphasizes that in the c