III. The Klein-Bion Expansion of Freud's Metapsychology

Sigmund Freud's genius was a child of its time and he was naturally preoccupied with the current scientific developments and psychotherapeutic methods. He wanted to create an explanatory science which could prove things. He naturally looked upon the mind and brain as phenomenologically identical and was pre-occupied with a neuro-physiological model, with “hydrostatics”, with the Darwinian framework of evolution applied to the mind. This model drew on comparative anatomy, embryology and, unfortunately, archaeology, backed by the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, to frame a metaphor which was mistaken for a theory. While these gave him tremendously useful tools they also imposed their limitations when treated as theoretical hypotheses requiring experimental proof.

This model of the mind, which is made explicit (as preconceptions) in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, did indeed stay with him all his life. It was a model that was bound, by its own structure, to impose on him a view of mental life in which he could not possibly have believed but that he nonetheless used as a basis for scientific work. It viewed the life of the mind as bound to the body and its needs, and thus engaged upon finding means to gratify these needs without running into an absolute confrontation with the environment, human and non-human. Freud eventually also came upon evidence of another agency that the personality has to satisfy, that is the agency of the conscience, of the Superego. His picture of the personality was a slightly sad one as spelt out in The Ego and the Id. He pictured the Ego as serving three masters - the Id (the instincts), the outside world, and the Superego. Using all the tricks and devices of its intelligence to outwit these three masters, the Ego sought to find some kind of balance, a peaceful co-existence. When Freud later came to formulate the theory of the Life and Death Instincts, it appeared that the very purpose of life was to die peacefully. It does