ABSTRACT
Following the publication of Totem and Taboo, Freud embarked on a series of essays designed to consolidate, rethink, and systematize the general theory of mind he had been developing over the previous two decades. Freud called these texts his “metapsychology,” a term that had led to considerable confusion. Contrary to Sulloway’s influential claim that these papers—“On Narcissism” and the five wartime “Papers on Metapsychology”—represent the “progressive biologizing” of Freud’s thought, a close examination of these texts demonstrates the opposite: a progressive “sociologizing” of his theories in terms of a heightened appreciation of the impact of social and cultural forces on psychic phenomena, and an increasing concern with the extension of psychoanalysis to fundamental issues of social and political life. In particular, the introduction of the concepts of “narcissism” and the “ego ideal” rendered Freud’s Lamarckian assumptions superfluous, altered his account of character formation, and acknowledged a pathway by which culture enters the psychic apparatus.
