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Freud's work establishes a link between an excessive amount of excitation, the infant's experience of helplessness, and trauma. The idea of excess emphasises a quantitative element, not reducible to the field of representation. In this paper I explore the notions of excess and closure in relation to two clinical examples. A patient who lived through experiences of excess and flooding is contrasted with another patient whose experience of excess is expressed through withdrawal. The complex process of elaboration and working through in their analyses takes place by bringing together affect, representation, sensorial and somatic experiences, dreams, associations and enactments as they are gathered and given meaning après coup through analytic work. Two concepts were central to the understanding of what took place in the analyses: excorporation and figurability . The paper emphasizes the place of temporality in creating a triadic space in an analysis as it relates the here and now with the there and then in the work of après-coup . The paper also traces the roots of this modern approach that relates the analyst's work of regression, time, and the creation of a triadic space to Freud's metapsychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recent paper, Fulgencio shows how Winnicott rejected the basic speculative concepts of Freud’s metapsychology – Trieb, psychical apparatus and libido – and replaced them with non-speculative concepts that promoted a factual theorization. In this paper, the author examines some of Winnicott’s concepts and attempts to demonstrate how, rather than replacing Freud’s concepts, he provides a factual foundation for the metapsychology in the double dependence of the infant in care. Freud never actually disregards the necessity of early mothering but he takes it for granted. By differentiating between ego needs and id needs, ego-relatedness and id-relatedness, object-mother and environment-mother, Winnicott attempts to theorize what Freud takes for granted: the function of the holding environment as a framework for id-experiences and the function of object-presenting as a condition of reality-testing. Furthermore, by differentiating between pure male and pure female elements, he is also able to construct a highly speculative theorization in order to distinguish two basic principles: doing and being. Although the death drive is clearly rejected, this rejection follows from his theorization of double dependence. Consequently, the author suggests that Winnicott did not discard metapsychological concepts but theorized the conditions for using both these and the intrapsychic topography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Translations of summary This article offers an entirely new way of addressing middle age or mid-life. It uses the neologism maturescence to denote this process's metapsychological feature, and it proposes a meta-psychology of maturescence in order to allow a 'direct understanding of maturescence' instead of the 'indirect understanding of maturescence', which psychoanalytic literature generally alludes to. The paper examines somatic processes specific to male and female climacterics and is focused on to the tension between the soma and the body. It examines the drive increase that Freud posed in climacterics and the somatic climacteric imbalance that begets specific drive activity demanding psychic work, with very different pathways depending on the individual's specific working-through activity. It discusses what happens to the individual when he/she is no longer able to procreate and begins to age; why this process is equivalent for individuals who had children and for others who could not or did not. This somatic event provides a universal constant from which it is possible to understand any individual variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we re-examine the second instinctual dualism hypothesis introduced by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle . We suggest that the life instinct hypothesis as something opposed to the death instinct does not seem to fit into this theory easily. On the other hand, death instinct turns out to be an internal necessity of Freudian metapsychological theory from the beginning of Freud ’s metapsychological writing. We shall argue, based on the ideas formulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in later metapsychological texts, that Freud could not wholly justify the existence of an opposition and a symmetry between the two classes of instincts. Even though up to his last works Freud held on to this instinctual dualism, again and again his arguments lead to the idea that the life instincts should be regarded, ultimately, as death instincts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the author seeks to analyse the nature and function of metapsychological theory in Freudian psychoanalysis. He shows that Freudian psychoanalytic theory is composed of an empirical part--the psychology of clinical facts--and a speculative part--metapsychology. Freud considers this latter part as being a speculative superstructure of value that is only heuristic, capable of being supplanted by other superstructures of the same type. The author sustains the idea that this metapsychology is the fruit of speculative method, whose foundations were elaborated by philosophers and epistemologists before Freud, including Immanuel Kant and Ernst Mach. He concludes with considerations regarding the future of metapsychological theorisation, presenting criticisms of Freudian metapsychology offered by both philosophers and psychoanalysts, and pointing to the perspective opened by Donald W. Winnicott of a psychoanalysis without metapsychology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]