This book presents a detailed reconstruction of the development of Freud’s metapsychology and discusses its contributions to contemporary research on the nature of the mind. Through close textual and historical analysis, Fátima Caropreso examines Freud’s evolving conceptions of the unconscious, consciousness, mental representation, the psychical apparatus, drives, and the mind-body relationship, paying particular attention to the links between Freud’s early neurological investigations and his later metapsychological formulations, showing how questions originally framed within neurology remained central to psychoanalytic theory even after its language became predominantly psychological.

A key contribution of the book is its exploration of how Freudian metapsychology can inform contemporary neuroscientific and neuropsychoanalytic research. By clarifying the conceptual foundations of Freud’s theory of the unconscious and its underlying assumptions about brain processes, the book provides a critical framework for evaluating current attempts to integrate psychoanalysis, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Rather than treating metapsychology as a historical curiosity, it presents it as a resource for addressing enduring questions about the nature of the mind, the emergence of consciousness, and the relationship between neural and mental processes.

Combining scholarship in psychoanalysis, the history of psychology, and philosophy of mind, Freud and the Nature of the Mind: Unconscious and Consciousness in Metapsychology offers a rigorous account of Freud’s metapsychological project and its significance for contemporary interdisciplinary research. 

This is the English version of a book originally published in Brazilian Portuguese. The translation of the original manuscript into English was done with the help of artificial intelligence. A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content.

Fátima Caropreso is a psychologist with an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She is a full professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate Program in Psychology at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil). She is also a visiting fellow in the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex (UK). Her main area of expertise is the history and epistemology of psychoanalysis. Some of her main publications include "Life and Death in Freudian Metapsychology: A Reappraisal of the Second Instinctual Dualism" (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2009, co-authored with Richard Simanke), "The Death Instinct and the Mental Dimension Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the Works of Spielrein and Freud" (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2017), "Sabina Spielrein's Theory of the Origin and Development of Language" (International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020), "Barbara Low and Sabina Spielrein: Misrepresentations of Their Works in the History of Psychoanalysis" (American Imago, 2022, co-authored with Richard Simanke), "Death Instinct and Mental Conflict in Sabina Spielrein’s Early Work" (American Imago, 2024), and "The Research Trajectory of Judith Kestenberg: From the Study of Movements to Research with Child Victims of the Holocaust" (S:I.M.O.N. - Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation, 2024).