METAPSYCHOLOGY I: FREUD'S STRUCTURAL THEORY, AND THE CONCEPTS OF EGO AND INNER WORLD

This chapter serves two purposes. First, it examines the metapsychology of Kleinian explanation. Metapsychology – Freud's term for a viewpoint which unifies all aspects of psychoanalytic explanation, ‘the consummation of psychoanalytic research’ – may be understood as concerned with the conditions of possibility of psychoanalytic explanation. Second, the chapter considers some of the broad consequences of psychoanalytic explanation for our view of human personality. In this section I will consider some important features of Kleinian theory, and indicate how they facilitate revisions of some of Freud's concepts.

Freud's later topography of id, ego, and superego, known as the ‘structural theory’, which superseded the topography of Cs., Pcs. and Ucs., anticipated and laid the grounds for Kleinian theory. I will try to show how the structural theory can be understood in Kleinian terms.

The structural theory's tripartite picture of ego, id and superego relates these elements to one another somewhat as different stages in mental processing.