ABSTRACT
Emotional phenomenology embodies the tragic, in that emotional experiencing is finite, transient, context-dependent, ever-changing, and decaying. Metapsychology evades the tragic by means of metaphysical illusion. Phenomenology/metapsychology is a trauma-driven binary insofar as finite human existing, stripped of sheltering illusions, is inherently traumatizing. The theoretical language of self psychology, with its noun, "the self," reifies the experiencing of selfhood and transforms it into a metaphysical entity with thing-like properties. George Klein claims that S. Freud's psychoanalytic theory actually amalgamates two theories—a metapsychology and a clinical theory—deriving from two different universes of discourse. Metapsychology deals with the material substrate of experience and is couched in the natural science framework of impersonal structures, forces, and energies. Clinical psychoanalysis asks "why" questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks "how" questions and seeks answers in terms of the non-experiential realm of impersonal mechanisms and causes.
