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Metapsychology (from meta- 'beyond, transcending' and psychology) Metapsychology Online Medical Dictionary is that aspect of a psychoanalytic theory that discusses the terms that are essential to it, but leaves aside or transcends the phenomena that the theory deals with. Psychology refers to the concrete conditions of the human psyche, metapsychology to psychology itself (cf. the comparison of metaphysics and physics).
These precise concepts led Freud to say that their unified presentation would make it possible to achieve the highest goal of psychology, namely, the development of a comprehensively founded model of health. Such an idea is crucial for the diagnostic process because illnesses – the treatment and prevention of which is the focus of all medical activity – can only be recognised in contrast to or as deviations from a state of health.
Freud left this central part of his work to future analysts in the unfinished state of a torso, since – as he stated – the fields of knowledge required to complete metapsychology were barely developed or did not exist in the first half of the 20th century. This refers above all to ethological primate research and its extension to the field of anthropology. Freud considers findings from these areas of knowledge to be indispensable because without them it is not possible to examine and, where necessary, correct his hypothesis of natural social coexistence in the primordial horde postulated by Darwin (see presented for discussion in Totem and Taboo). The same applies to the hypothetical abolition of horde life through the introduction of monogamy by a corresponding agreement among the sons who killed the primal father of the horde. For the same reasons, Freud's claim also extends to the assumed origin of moral codes of behavior (totemism), the differentiation of sexual from social and intellectual needs (instinctively formed communities versus consciously conceived political superstructures; foundations of belief and knowledge systems), and much more. In Moses and Monotheism, the author refers one last time to the lack of primate research at the time.
The empirical foundations of Freudian metapsychology are neurological processes and close relationships to Darwin's theory of evolution. The libidinal energy, which according to this metapsychology drives all biological and mental processes through its inherent desire, represents in a certain sense a teleological thesis.
More recently, it is regarded as a hermeneutics of understanding with relations to Freud's literary sources, especially Sophocles, and, to a lesser extent, Goethe and Shakespeare. Interest on the possible scientific status of psychoanalysis has been renewed in the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis, whose major exemplar is Mark Solms. The hermeneutic vision of psychoanalysis is the focus of influential works by Donna Orange.
Three years after completing his unpublished Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud's optimism had completely vanished. In a letter dated September 22 of that year, he told Fliess: "I am not at all in disagreement with you, 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 als only the psychological were under consideration. Why I cannot fit it together the I have not even begun to fathom". "When, in his 'Autobiographical Study' of 1925, Freud called his metapsychology a 'speculative superstructure'...the elements of which could be abandoned or changed once proven inadequate, he was, in the terminology of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment , proposing a psychology als ob or as if'' – a heuristic model of mental functioning that did not necessarily correspond with external reality."
A salient example of Freud's own metapsychology is his characterization of psychoanalysis as a "simultaneously closed system, fundamentally unrelated and impervious to the external world and as an open system inherently connected and responsive to environmental influence.
In the 1910s, Freud wrote a series of twelve essays, to be collected as Preliminaries to a Metapsychology. Five of these were published independently under the titles: "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes," "Repression," "The Unconscious," "A Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams," and "Mourning and Melancholia." The remaining seven remained unpublished, an expression of Freud's ambivalence about his own attempts to articulate the whole of his vision of psychoanalysis. In 1919 he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salome, "Where is my Metapsychology? In the first place it remains unwritten". In 1920 he published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a text with metaphysical ambitions.
Midcentury psychoanalyst David RapaportErwin, Edward (2002). "Metapsychology" (p. 339). defined the term thus: "Books on psychoanalysis usually deal with its clinical theory... there exists, however, 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."
Ego psychologist Heinz Hartmann also added 'the adaptive" point of view' to Freud's metapsychology, although Lacan who interpreted metapsychology as the symbolic, the Real, and the imaginary, said "the dimension discovered by analysis is the opposite of anything which progresses through adaptation."
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