Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane ("Psychotherapy and the Human Sciences")

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David Rapaport's Seminars on Metapsychology of 1957

In 1957 David Rapaport (1911-1960) gave a series of seminars on psychoanalytic metapsychology to the first year candidates of the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Connecticut). These seminars were never published, but only audio-recorded and then typewritten and assembled in seven folders edited in 1959 by Stuart C. Miller, M.D.: three volumes on "Elementary Metapsychology" and four volumes on "Advanced Metapsychology", for a total of about 700 typewritten pages. The participants, besides Rapaport who was always present, were Helen G. Gilmore, Nathaniel J. London, Seymour L. Lustman, George F. Mahl, Stuart C. Miller, John P. Plunkett, Herbert S. Sacks, Roy Schafer, Virginia Suttenfield, and Robert B. White (in some seminars there were also Paul E. Emery, Jean Schimek, David Shapiro, Eugene Talbot, Eugene E. Trunnel, and Ess A. White Jr.). Since Rapaport could not complete the program because of pressure of time, he added small parts of seminars (edited by Jean Schimek, Ph.D.) given in the same year for the psychiatric and psychological Fellows at the Austen Riggs Center (Stockbridge, Massachusetts), and in volume 3 of Elementary Metapsychology (pp. 375-466) he added two seminars given at the Austen Riggs Center two years later, in 1959. (Parts of these seminars, with introductory notes by Pier Francesco Galli, M.D., and Paolo Migone, M.D., have been published in Italian on pp. 661-669 of issue no. 4/2014 and on pp. 357-359 and 360-382 of issue no. 3/2020 of the journal Psicoterapia e Scienze Umane).

Here are the seven volumes (we thank the Erikson Institute library of Austen Riggs Center for the assistance):

Seminars on Elementary Metapsychology:

Volume 1:

The Interpretation of Dreams

Volume 2:

Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning (p. 165)

On Narcissism: An Introduction (p. 195a)

Instincts and their Vicissitudes (p. 249)

Repression (p. 291)

Volume 3:

The Unconscious (p. 328)

The Metapsychological Supplement to the Theory of Dreams (p. 375)