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From Freud’s Witch to a new metapsychology

Volume chapter author (s): Imbasciati A.

In Freud’s time “psychology” was a proper psychology of consciousness: it meant what one could consciously know about himself. Freud discovered unconscious events: he must explain to his contemporary scientists how these phenomena could exsist an how an unconscious mind might function. He wrote his metapsychology (1915): “meta” (=beyond) would say that mind could be considered also beyond consciouseness psychology. He supposed that the unconscious was moved by an instinctual force (libido) for which he used the german word “trieb” (=push). This word was hardly transalated as “drive” and in neolatin as“pulsion” . Like all his contemporaries, Freus had the implicit idea that everything psychic should becomes conscious, but he ascertained the patients “resistence” (=wiederstand) to become conscious. This is the reason for his supposing another force, which bared the way to consciousness: he called it “verdrangung” (=counterpush), which was translated by “repression”. With such concepts Freud “invented” (zu erraten) his Energy-and-Drive theory.
Freud’s Metapsychology marked psychoanalysis success, because it was a clear and simple theory: an “explanatory” theory for his contemporaries. Till nowdays people identifies psychoanalysis in those freudian terms: drives, repression, libido and so on. Freud was conscious that his theory was only a hipothesis (something like a “fantasy”), but his followers reified his concepts, as they were real facts he discovered.Till nowadays people think Freud has “discovered” drives and repression. This popular idea is still alive and this makes a very bad image about psychoanalysis, because it no longer agrees with psychoanalytic clinics, nor with other sciences of mind.. In facts clinical psychoanalysis had an enourmous change and progress since Freud’s time, but psychonalytical Institutions did’n care enucleating a new explicative theory about how they work to days, like Freud’s Metapsychology explained hundred years ago. Between clinics an theory there is nowadays a huge gap and contradiction. People know the 1915 psychoanalysis and nobody offered them a new updated theory: clear to everybody. So people nowdays think psychonalysis is only an old aged theory like a story.
A new metapsychology is needed, but psychoanalysts –chiefly their Institutions- fear to offend the Master’s memory, if they explicitate his metapsychology is not yet trustwhorty. Thogh Freud was conscious his theory was a “fantasy”( he called it “the Witch”), a religious respect prevents psychonalalysts to tell around that those freudian concepts are not yet available.
In this book the Author, by his many competences, as psychoanalyst, experimental psychologist and Infant researcher and neuropsychiatrist, sketches out his new “explication” about origins, structure, construction, development and working of mind. He outlines a new metapsychology based on an integration of nowdays psychoanalysis, psychophisiology, Infant Research, neurosciences, wich may tell us what we know ti days about psychic functioning.