Structural functional theory definition
The first, within psychoanalysis itself, accompanied the advent of child psychoanalysis and of theoretical options that stressed development. This separation has been spurred by two currents of thought. The structural and the developmental have nevertheless often been opposed to each other by psychoanalysts, who have privileged one to the detriment of the other. If one accepts the idea that any structure may be apprehended in terms of its genesis (the successive stages of its establishment), and that any genetic process presents its own diachronic structure, it would seem that the two perspectives must be inextricably linked. The structural view was always paralleled in Freud by a developmental approach to the same issues. Two major stages in Freud's approach to these laws were represented by the metapsychological papers of 1915 and by his introduction in the 1920-1923 period of a second topography and a second theory of the instincts. It is thus possible to distinguish those writings in which Freud described partial, local aspects of that operation in terms of a network -as, for example, the breast-feces-penis-money interplay of symbolic equivalents -and indeed the term complex itself denotes such a local organization those writings concerned with modalities of overall mental functioning characteristic of particular groups of individuals (for example, the obsessional structure) and those writings whose subject was the general laws of mental functioning. The whole of Freud's subsequent work strove for an ever more refined and better articulated description of the operation of the psychical apparatus as a structure, and this at a number of levels. Sometimes, even, several interconnected nodes were observable, like those constituting what Freud called a "pathogenic organization." It contains nodal points at which two or more threads meet" (1895d, p.
After describing how ideas are linked together, for instance, he observed that their concatenations crossed at "nodal points" which it was the task of analysis to locate: "The logical chain corresponds not only to a zigzag, twisted line, but rather to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one. During this first period in the development of psychoanalysis, Freud was already specifying local aspects of an overall functioning. This was clear in Freud'sworkas early as the "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1950c ) and his reformulation of the ideas of the "Project" five years later in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a). This last category would include the psychical apparatus in Freud's sense, and that apparatus can thus be deemed the object of a structural theory in psychoanalysis.įrom its earliest formulations, Freudian metapsychology may indeed be looked upon as a structural theory according to the above definition, for it was meant to describe the functioning of a system made up of interdependent elements, namely the psychical apparatus as a whole. Such a definition applies equally well to inanimate material systems (self-regulating machines), to constructions of the mind (logico-mathematical wholes, as for instance set theory), to living organisms, or to subsystems of living organisms.
A structure may be defined as a functional whole presiding over a system of transformations and governed by self-regulating mechanisms. A structural theory may be defined as one which tends to organize a set of propositions -and, in the realm of the natural sciences, a set of observations to which they refer -as a whole made up of interdependent parts.