ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the fundamental conceptual basis of psychoanalysis and provides a metapsychology for contemporary psychoanalytical practice. In its original form, the book was a straightforwardly philosophical treatise on the nature of reality that attempted to combine the language of Western metaphysics with insights from Eastern philosophical systems as well as from the author's own meditation experiences. The book aims to chart the most direct and most reliable path through the jungle of metapsychology, and to do this one has to begin at the beginning, not jump into the middle of tangled thickets where others have already gotten stuck. Some readers may find this unnecessarily tedious; perhaps such readers can be compared with musicians who complain that they simply want to play the works of their favourite composers without having to care about the complex history and origins of all this equal temperament stuff.
