Language and Psychoanalysis: Unlearning Freudian Metapsychology

A guest post by Robert Stolorow, Ph.D., Ph.D.

The following is a shortened version of a paper soon to be published in an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, entitled “Philosophy and Psychoanalysis.” The text is drawn from a presentation at Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, Scientific Meeting, 11/22/25.

Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells.

Martin Heidegger (1946/1998)

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)

George S. Klein (1976) was a psychoanalytic theorist whose views had a major impact on my thinking. He claimed that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories—a metapsychology and a clinical theory—deriving from two different universes of discourse. Metapsychology deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Clinical theory, by contrast, deals with intentionality and the unconscious meanings of personal experience, seen from the perspective of the individual’s unique life history. Clinical psychoanalysis asks “why” questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks “how” questions and seeks answers in terms of the nonexperiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein sought to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts, retaining only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For Klein, the essential psychoanalytic enterprise involves the reading of disclaimed intentionality and the unlocking of unconscious meanings from a person’s experience, a task for which the concepts of the clinical theory, purged of metapsychological contaminants, are uniquely suited.

Expanding on Klein’s distinction, one might characterize psychoanalytic clinical theory as emotional phenomenology and psychoanalytic metapsychology as a form of metaphysics, in that it postulates ultimate realities and universal truths. In my view this division is characteristic of all the major psychoanalytic theories— they are mixtures of emotional phenomenology and metaphysics. Emotional phenomenology embodies the tragic, in that emotional experiencing is finite, transient, context-dependent, ever changing, and decaying. Metapsychology evades the tragic by means of metaphysical illusion.

That Freud’s metapsychological theory of instinctual drives is a form of metaphysics is explicitly reflected in some of his remarks (Freud, 1937) linking his theory to the metaphysical thinking of the philosopher of ancient Greece, Empedocles (born 495 b.c.). What was Empedocles’ theory that was nearly identical to Freud’s ideas about the instinctual drives? It was the notion that the cosmos is ruled by a conflict between two immense, antagonistic forces, one leading to growth and integration and the other to decline and fragmentation (pp. 245-246).

The philosopher taught that two principles governed events in the life of the universe and in the life of the mind, and that those principles were everlastingly at war with each other. He called them philia (love) and neikos (strife). Of these two powers—which he conceived of as being at bottom ‘natural’ forces operating like instincts, “. . . the one strives to agglomerate the primal particles of the four elements into a single unity, while the other, on the contrary, seeks to undo all those fusions and to separate the primal particles of the elements from one another…. The two fundamental principles of Empedocles . . . are, both in name and function, the same as our two primal instincts, Eros and destructiveness, the first of which endeavors to combine what exists into ever greater unities, while the second endeavors to dissolve those combinations and to destroy the structures to which they have given rise” (1937, p. 246).

So Freud saw in early Greek philosophy a conception replicating in all important respects the dual-instinct theory that dominated his thinking about human nature from the writing of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) to “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). What purpose and meaning can we discern in his postulating the existence of two primal drives, Eros and Thanatos, universally determining the course of human events? I envision this purpose as one of attempting to free the human being from what Atwood and I call “the unbearable embeddedness of being” (Stolorow & Atwood, 1992, p. 22), accomplished by a transposing of the most decisive issues in a life from the world of our shared existence to a sphere of isolated interiority—the intrapsychic realm, in which drive energies undergird and determine the course of human events. Insofar as the vicissitudes of subjective life are directed by such internal dynamics, the fate of the person escapes the world of relations with others: the world of loving and hating, of joyful union and devastating loss of faith in the beloved and the bitter pain that comes when bonds of trust are broken by betrayal and abandonment.

Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is primarily a contribution to clinical theory. Existential themes like temporality/finitude, death/nothingness, and authenticity/inauthenticity add a great deal to psychoanalytic understanding and therapy. Also important is Heidegger’s term for the human—Dasein. Sein or Being for Heidegger is a word for “intelligibility as,” and so Dasein locates the intelligibility of the human in a da, a there, a context. The human, for Heidegger, is a Being-in-the-world. There is no more Cartesian isolated mind.

I began to focus on the clinical relevance of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology (Stolorow, 2016), after having recently experienced a devastating traumatic loss. Around this time I read Being and Time and was astonished to see that Heidegger’s description of the phenomenology of anxiety was almost identical to my own experience of my traumatized state.

For Heidegger, existential anxiety (Angst) is phenomenologically very distinct from fear. Unlike fear, Angst is not about a dangerous entity. Instead it is about human existence as such, specifically its finitude. When one is anxious, everyday ways of fleeing from finitude have broken down, and one is confronted with the inevitability of death— nothingness—as inherent to human existence. Existentially, we are “always already” dying, and the Angst that discloses death’s inevitability takes the form of alienation from others and uncanniness—a sense of not being at home in the everyday world. Such alienation and uncanniness are the hallmarks of a traumatized state. Understanding this is of enormous help in facilitating psychoanalytic therapy with traumatized patients.

[Freudian] instinct language bestows structure on human experience. Philosophers of language refer to this as “as-structure”--“intelligibility as” (Stolorow & Atwood, 2018). For Heidegger (1927/1962), the Being of an entity is its intelligibility as the entity it is. The process through which the intelligibility of entities is constituted Heidegger called “the clearing.” The clearing of Being (intelligibility as) is accomplished by language. Since Being is equivalent to “intelligibility as,” it makes sense that language would be its home or ground.

Philosopher Charles Taylor (1916) has presented an explication of two metatheories of language, two semantic logics—the designative and the constitutive. In the designative viewpoint, the mind is ontologically isolated from the external world and makes contact with it by creating ideas that represent independent objects therein. In this view, words acquire meaning by being attached to the ideas that represent objects within this self-standing external reality. In the designative perspective the fully formed idea precedes its naming. In the constitutive viewpoint, by contrast, language transforms and introduces new meanings into the world of our involvements. Language co-creates the things it names by allowing them to show up in experience as something. From the constitutive perspective language is inherently interpretive, not merely descriptive. It transforms the world of our involvements by introducing a new manner of disclosing—i.e., new meanings, which can be spoken or enacted. As a framework of intelligibility, language is a picture which seems to fix experience unambiguously. The clearing of Being (“intelligibility as”) is accomplished by language.

Language bewitches when it treats a constitutive process as if it were designative. Wittgenstein (1953) describes this as a quasi-hallucinatory process:

“A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense unambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. …. [T]he form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness.” (Section 426)

In place of the picture given by contexts of use—finite, contingent, unstable, transient—one can imagine [e.g., in metapsychological theories drawn from Freud] the clear outlines of everlasting metaphysical entities. Such entities remain housed in the background [in much current psychoanalytic theorizing].

A radical theorectomy is needed!

REFERENCES

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey, ed. and trans. Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. 18:7–64.

Freud, S. (1937(. Analysis terminable and interminable. Standard ed., 23:216–253.

Heidegger, M. (1927/1962). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row.

Heidegger, M. (1946/1998) Letter on Humanism. (F. Capuzzi, Trans.). In W. McNeill (Ed.), Pathmarks (pp. 239–276). Cambridge: Cambridge University.

Klein, G. S. (1976). Psychoanalytic theory: An exploration of essentials. Madison, Conn: International Universities Pres

Stolorow, R. (2016). Using Heidegger. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 64(4):NP12-NP15. DOI: 10.1177/0003065116669938

Stolorow, R. & Atwood, G. (1992). Contexts of Being: The Intersubjective Foundation of Psychological Life. Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press.

Stolorow, R. & Atwood, G. (2018). Language and the As-Structure of Experience. Human Studies, 41, 513-515.

Taylor, C. (2016). The language animal: The full shape of human linguistic ca- pacity. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations . Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.