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0.1. Our problem centers on the relation between metapsychology and psychoanalytical practice. One of the requirements for the solution of this problem is to clarify the relationship between the “metapsychological theories” and the so-called “clinical theories”. These questions have long been a source of embroilment, so much so that they now form a division of psychoanalysis all of its own. The corpus of psychoanalytical knowledge has become so swollen that no single person can have command of it all, and therefore is forced to choose a speciality. However, I am no specialist in metapsychology at all. The sources on which I have relied are Freud and some of the more modern psychoanalysts such as Klein, Gill, Holt, Schafer and Rubinstein. One exposition that would seem relevant to our purposes, namely Sulloway's extensive work (1979) on Freud the biologist, I have not been able to find the time to study.
We may ask the question what Freud exactly had in mind with his metapsychology. His teachings and metascientific assumptions have often been criticized, and some of it may well be justified and have clarified matters. Freud changed his metapsychological ideas at different phases in the development of psychoanalysis. Even though he explicitly rejected some of his earlier formulations, he was, as it has been claimed, still implicitly under their influence (Gill, 1976, p. 76ff). One extremely negative point of view is that metapsychology, if not directly harmful for the practice of psychoanalysis (e.g., Schafer, 1976), is at any rate quite irrelevant.