Problems in Freud's Metapsychology

This article first seeks to analyze in the light of the history of science, two fundamental problems concerning the metapsychology of Freud and the interpretation of these in the related literature that has appeared since. The two problems in question are psychophysi-calism and the dichotomous splitting of the subject. An examination of Freud's conceptual development leads to two hypotheses, namely the so-called three-level model and the partitioning of the subject into an adaptive and a psychosexual register.