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Once Freud had learned that neurotic symptoms represented a conflict between incompatible ideas or fantasies he began to speculate about the nature of ideas and other vicissitudes of fantasy formation. These attempts at explaining the process of thought came to be known as metapsychology. Atwood and Stolorow have written two eminently readable, interesting, and important volumes arguing that this was a mistake. They join those other psychoanalysts who believe that we would be better off if we did not concern ourselves with the reasons for thought and contented ourselves with investigating and understanding its meaning only. They wish to develop “a metapsychology-free framework to guide clinical psychoanalytic conceptualization and treatment” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979, p. 11), “a metapsychology-free framework for the study of human personality” (Atwood & Stolorow, 1984, p. 173).
The major portion of the first published volume of this dyad, Faces in a Cloud, aptly subtitled Subjectivity and Personality Theory, is devoted to a convincing demonstration that an examination of the theoretical speculations of four major psychoanalytic thinkers—Freud, Jung, Reich, and Rank—show that in each case the particular difficulties of their respective childhood foreshadowed what each in later years postulated as being the central life task with which everyone had to struggle. The authors adduce the evidence indicating that Freud in his unconscious attempt to disavow his disappointment with his mother, created a theory that postulated that conflict was not a reaction to disappointment but to innate drives; biology rather than environment is responsible for the misery of the human condition. Jung's life was dominated by the fear of the loss of self in and through fantasy. For