Toward a “Project for a Scientific Psychoanalysis:”

Dr. Kernberg’s current contribution (Kernberg, 2021) is a welcome effort to re-examine and revise some fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory and technique in light of emerging data from the cognitive and affective neurosciences, by one of today’s most distinguished psychoanalytic theoreticians and clinicians. This attempt is refreshing, since during the last fifty years, and perhaps even earlier, psychoanalysis all but ceased to formulate and discuss amendments to some of the basic tenets of its metapsychology. Metapsychology, a term originally coined by Freud (1898a), came to mean the theory behind the theory – what Rapaport (1959; quoted in Erwin, 2002, p. 339) defined as “a fragmentary – yet consistent – general theory of psychoanalysis, which comprises the premises of the special (clinical) theory, the concepts built on it, and the generalizations derived from it... named metapsychology.” Throughout the century since it was published, Freud’s structural, tripartite model of the mind (Freud, 1923) served, at times implicitly, as a common metapsychological basis for almost all discussions about theory and technique that have taken place among the psychoanalytic community, and within the main corpus of psychoanalytic literature. Object relations theory, attachment theory, relational approaches, and self-psychology have all transformed and diversified many aspects of psychoanalytic technique, and have all made numerous contributions to psychoanalytic theories of motivation and development (Kernberg, 2001; Mitchell & Black, 1995). However, they have left some of Freud’s structural formulations of the mind essentially unaltered. If metapsychology amounts to theories about the structure of the human mental apparatus on the one hand, and about the nature of the forces which act upon it, its inherent motivational systems, and its ontogenetic development, on the other hand, then psychoanalysis has made important revisions and diverse amendments to the latter, but did not seriously attempt to re-formulate or refresh the basic structural model laid down by its founder a century ago. By and large, rather than revise the existing model or offer something new, the main body of psychoanalytic thought largely endorsed Freud’s tripartite model of the mind “as is.” In my opinion, part of the explanation for this persistent lack of change stems from a state of affairs that has alsobeen the reason for the emergenceof neuropsychoanalysis, aswell as for its value to psychoanalysis today and tomorrow. As discussed by Solms (2000), Freud the neurologist and neuroscientist was intimately and deeply familiar with the neurobiology and neuropathology of his time. His metapsychology thus reflected the impact that this knowledge had on his thinking and theorizing upon the psychoanalytic data that began to emerge from his clinical encounters in the consulting room. However, despite his favorable interdisciplinary starting point, or perhaps because of it, Freud was painfully aware of his lack of ability to produce a coherent, unified theory that would fit the neurobiology he knew with the psychoanalytic insights that he was discovering. In a letter to Fliess from 1898 he declared: “I am ... not at all inclined to leave psychology hanging in the air without an organic basis. But apart from this conviction, I do not know how to go on, neither theoretically nor therapeutically, and therefore must behave as if