Does Psychoanalysis Need a Metapsychology? A Reply to John Riker (original) (raw)

I wonder whether Riker is familiar with the thinking of George S. Klein, whose work was published posthumously in 1976, a year before Kohut's formal christening of self psychology and its bipolar self. Klein, like Kohut, was a psychoanalytic radical who had a major impact on my viewpoint. Klein (1976) claimed that Freud's psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories-a metapsychology and a clinical theory-deriving from two different universes of discourse. Freudian metapsychology deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Freudian clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual's unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks "why" questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks "how" questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person's experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited. Klein's proposals for a radical theorectomy for psychoanalysis have significantly influenced such contemporary thinkers as Merton Gill, Roy Schafer, and those, including George Atwood and myself (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018), who have sought to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. Expanding on Klein's distinction, I would characterize psychoanalytic clinical theory as emotional phenomenology and psychoanalytic metapsychology as a form of metaphysics, in that it postulates ultimate realities and universal truths. I contend that this division is characteristic of all the major psychoanalytic theories-they are mixtures of emotional phenomenology and metaphysics. Emotional phenomenology embodies the tragic, in that emotional experiencing is finite, transient, contextdependent, ever changing and decaying. Metapsychology evades the tragic through metaphysical illusion. Phenomenology/metaphysics is a trauma-driven binary. Wait, Kohut proposed his own radical theorectomy for psychoanalysis, in a truly remarkable essay, seventeen years before Klein-"Introspection, Empathy, and Psychoanalysis: An Examination of the Relationship Between Mode of Observation and Theory" (Kohut, 1959)-one of my favorites. There he contended that the domain of psychoanalytic inquiry is defined and delimited by its method of observation, which always relies on introspection and empathy. Only that which is in principle accessible to empathy and introspection belongs within the realm of psychoanalytic investigation and theorizing. Stunningly, for example, he suggests that the drives should be excised and only the experience of drivenness retained-a suggestion foreshadowing my own proposal-which has Riker and many others up in arms-to excise the self and retain only the experience of selfhood. The objectification of the experiencing of selfhood serves to render stable and solid a sense of personal identity otherwise subject to discontinuity, uncertainty, and fragmentation. A phenomenological-contextualist viewpoint, by contrast, embraces the vulnerability and context-dependence of human existence.