Action and Narration in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

F REUD EMPLOYED the term metapsychology to indicate that he was setting forth the general assumptions of a psychoanalytic psychology and the rules of conceptualization and explanation that would govern this psychology. The most general assumptions are these: psychoanalysis is a natural science; it is a general psychology; its method is introspective; its explanations are deterministic; and the pragmatic reality and moral principles to which many of its propositions refer are simply given and unambiguously knowable through scientific methods and sound personal judgment. Freud's rules of conceptualization are of a mixed sort in that they are appropriate both to a Newtonian machine and a Darwinian organism. In its mechanistic aspect, metapsychology is designed to yield accounts of the person as a mental apparatus. This apparatus is both constituted and controlled by principles (pleasure, reality), structures (id, ego, superego), mechanisms (defenses), and functions (reality testing, synthesis, etc.). The apparatus is made to work by mental energies (libido, aggression, and their modified forms). The status of processes in the mental apparatus may be conscious, preconscious (largely verbal and more or less easily made conscious), and unconscious (like the dream, largely imagistic and concrete, and made conscious only under special circumstances such as pathological weakness or creative relaxation of the ego's defenses or the inroads of the psychoanalytic process). The Darwinian organism enters as the carrier of instinctual drives (the source of the libidinal and aggressive energies), inherited emotional reaction tendencies (bisexuality, certain fears and aversions), and a capacity to develop from an initial state of helplessness to one of adaptation to an environment largely hostile to its instinctual nature.