Technical implications of the post-metapsychological era: toward a developmental psychoanalysis

At the beginning of the twentieth century Freud and Pavlov made complementary theoretical splits in their observational field. This splitting initiated a dialectical interaction that tended to polarize the Freudian mental world of insight and the psyche against the Pavlovian outer world of learning theories and the soma. The 1950s saw an exaggerated polarization between strict behaviorists and "classical" psychoanalysts. The linkage of ideas of therapeutic action with metapsychology also dates from Freud and is briefly illustrated. The recent substantial repudiation of metapsychology has undone this linkage and paved the way for a post-metapsychological conception of technique and therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. Among a number of paradigms now available, developmental psychoanalysis appears to be an emerging model derived from the epigenetic perspective in psychoanalysis. The paradigm is capable of reintegrating the methodological splits of Freud and Pavlov. Several first-order technical implications are discussed.