Commentary: Integrating a Dissociation-Prone Psychology

Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' and 'metapsychology' are reviewed. Reference is made to neuroscience literature highlighting the contemporary relevance of his ideas. Freud's core concepts are presented: biological needs; hierarchy of regulating systems; primary and secondary process thinking, unconscious and conscious systems; relation of mental systems to neuro-anatomical locations; and, communication between the two systems, including repression and dreaming. His ideas are summarised in terms of homeostasis and a hierarchy of characteristically different regulatory 'mental' systems.

History of the Human Sciences, 2012

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freu...

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 1993

WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 2022

What is the relationship between a philosophical or theoretical conception of mind, and the mind's conception of itself? Should the latter constrain the former? And how does the mind itself understand a theory of mind, that is, a theory of itself? I raise these questions by means of Freud. Freud suggested that the mind cannot merely theoretically comprehend psychoanalytic concepts but must be able to "recognize" and "sympathize" with them. I call this the recognition requirement. This idea clarifies the rationale behind Freud's last metapsychology of Id, Ego, and Super-ego. I close by asking: when should a theory of mind try to meet the recognition requirement? I propose that a theory of mind should be structured according to the recognition requirement when that theory is connected with practical aims, specifically, when the theory is concerned with the life of the mind and with facilitating the mind's own self-understanding.

Re-visiting Metapsychology Part 1 Origins and Development “We must call on the Witch to our help after all!” Goethe, Faust, Part I, Scene 6. (in Freud, 1937, p. 225) Freud wanted to be assured that the ‘therapy would not destroy the science’ in psycho-analysis. Presciently he had foreseen that the popular therapeutic use of his method might overshadow its function as a research methodology, obfuscating his cherished ‘metapsychology,’ a term so rarely uttered these days that many don’t really know what it refers to. Yet by 1915, having laid down the broad conceptual dimensions of his findings, Freud’s primary interest was not clinical but the scientific framework through which he hoped to find explanatory principles for the transformative phenomena and effects his method was bringing to light. He ended his life severely disappointed in the Weltanschauung of his era bemoaning that it could not provide adequate explanatory underpinnings for his depth psychology, urging those who followed to update and revise his metapsychology as new knowledge came about. Steps in revising these meta-theoretical foundations were undertaken in two interdisciplinary works; “Symbolization; Proposing a Developmental Paradigm for a New Psychoanalytic General Model of Mind” (1997/2016) and “Forms of Knowledge; A Psychoanalytic Study of Human Communication” (2008/2016), the first, a comprehensive revision of the topographical model, the second, an extension of this model into a study of human communication through the prism of the clinical and supervisory situations. The paradigm shift underlying these two volumes brings theory and practice under one conceptual system of ideas. Via a process-oriented vocabulary identifying the semiotic progressions and dialogical processes effectuating the method’s therapeutic action, the foundations for an updated metapsychology are radically altered for, as Freud (1917) stated, “What characterizes psycho-analysis as a science is not the material which it handles but the technique with which it works.” In part I, I present an historical overview of the concept and of the subsequent problems of metapsychology from its birth to the present day. This will be followed by participant questions, discussion, and a preview of how these problems have been tackled and re-cast in my two revisionary books, which will be addressed in detail in Part 11.

International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 2017

2014

Foreword of schools of sociological thought, not all explicitly Marxist though. Indeed, psychoanalysis and sociology were both shaped by tensions between engagement in social change and sometimes movements and projects of establishing scientific autonomy. Most dramatically, psychoanalysis pursued the depths of individual personality and character. Sociology commonly set itself against individualism and indeed against psychology. The contrast is real, and it is one of the reasons why the present volume is a useful effort in building bridges. But of course the disjuncture should not be overstated. Psychoanalysis examined social relations, especially in the family, as sources of individual psychology, and Freud and others extended psychoanalytic thinking to explore broad social questions. Sociology contributed to interdisciplinary social psychology and, in a few cases, tried to understand individuals not just oppose individualism. There have also been advocates for methodological individualism but this is not a matter of following leads from psychoanalysis. Most methodological individualism in fact takes individuals to be rather simple and unitary, decision-making bundles of interests and preferences. The theorists in question do not necessarily say individuals are quite so simple. Rather, some acknowledge that simplifying assumptions are merely required to make the models work. But the issue is an important one for sociology more generally, well beyond methodological individualism. In its repeated efforts to demonstrate the power and quasi-autonomy of the social, sociology risks neglecting the complexity of individuals. This can take the form of what Dennis Wrong called, in the era of functionalism, an "oversocialized concept of man." It can take the form of imagining that individual action is shaped by consistent interests rather than contradictory desires. It can take the form of forgetting that nodes in seemingly stable networks are in fact highly volatile shapers of relationships. Psychoanalysis offers sociology one path for grasping the interior space and complexity of individuals. This is partly a matter of attending to exceptionally influential and intense social life that helps to shape individual persons in families and other close relationships. Psychoanalysis is not only an exploration of individual sources-of a purely interior life. It addresses the interaction of the internal and external in experience, affect, memory, and learning. Psychoanalytic approaches vary in their attention to the social shaping of the person-and some emphasize innate predispositions and the very earliest experiences more than others. Still ego-analysis, object-relations, and the interpersonal analysis

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 2006

The paper links Freud's early work in the 'Project for a scientific psychology' with the psychoanalytic psychology of Kleinian object relations theory now current. Freud is often accused of introducing mechanism into his psychology and installing at its core an irreconcilable dichotomy of two disparate ways of explaining human behaviour. I suggest that Freud's early mechanistic thinking is an attempt at what he only partly achieves, a functional account of the 'mental apparatus'. I consider whether this way of conceptualising the mind in functional terms is methodologically relevant to psychoanalytic investigation or whether it is at best heuristically useful. From a brief consideration of Kleinian object relations theory, illustrated by case material, I conclude that there are grounds for accepting the first of these alternatives.