The Witch Meta-Psychology
Of the many and various meta-psychologies that populate the field of psychoanalysis, were we to locate certain gravity-wells of style from which spring autonomous theories of the psyche, we may read none more compelling (nor more cited) than these six:
1. Freud (too obvious to mention except that readers (me) are even still pulling disparate theory whole-cloth out of the SE like rabbits out of hats. Meta-psychology in Freud is multiple. Moreover, all meta-psychology, whether we like it or not, derives from Freud).
2. Klein
3. Lacan
4. Bion
5. Laplanche
6. Apollon
Clearly any psychoanalytic thinker with sufficient negativity will no doubt map their own meta-psychology from out of their reading and practice; meaning that this list is by no means conclusive and we may likewise include Rank, Ferenczi, Deutsch, Reich, Mahler, Fanon, Segal, Winnicott, Kristeva, Eigan, McDougal etc. But it is these six, due to their inimitable style, that make the principle vertices in the field—as far as I can tell (I have not read everything). From this view it seems (to this reader anyhow) that psychoanalytic meta-psychology proceeds by style, and style alone...
And yet one might also claim that there are as many meta-psychologies as there are patients—the patient is the real vortex. The truth of practice requires the suspension of meta-psychology; the evenly suspended attention of psychoanalytic listening precludes any and all theory. Meta-psychology is made to be broken (and yet, we must admit, that even this viewpoint derives from theory…).
In Freud’s letter to Einstein (Why War? 1933) he admits that his theory of the drives is a “mythology.” Likewise he names—in Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)—a “Witch Meta-psychology,” saying that in the face of the mysteries of unconscious processes, “we must call upon our witch.” While perhaps not Freud’s intention, this name cannot help but draw a clear line between psychoanalytic theory (mythological and witchy), and an enlightenment (read capitalist) science, parading as “facts” that seek to usurp and expropriate local feminine knowledges—the truth of the patient. Any meta-psychology worth the name “witch” is always provisional and advances on the side of the human.
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