Melanie Klein's metapsychology: phenomenological and mechanistic perspective

Freud's metapsychology is the subject of an important debate. This is over whether psychoanalysis is best construed as a science of the natural science type or as a special human science. The same debate applies to Melanie Klein's work. In Klein's metapsychology are two different and incompatible models of explanation. One is taken over from Freud's structural theory and appears to be similarly mechanistic. The other is clinically based and phenomenological. These two are discussed with special reference to the concepts of "phantasy" and "internal object".