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A PERSPECTIVE ON INTERPRETIVE METAPSYCHOLOGY has, in recent years, been emerging from a specific point of view, namely, for the conduct of a unique and individual, and, in basic respects, induplicable experience of psychoanalytic therapy. It points toward the increasing acceptance of the full psychic realism of that therapeutic experience, as it actually takes place, however it may later be interpreted and speculated about. That perspective not only requires a number of primary and irreversible changes in the structure of psychoanalytic inquiry, it also reflects a number of innovative changes in the limits and possibilities of the clinical psychoanalytic picture.
In theoretical effect, those changes open the order of metapsychology, without reservation, to all the interpretive myths and metaphors held by a potentially infinite universe of psychoanalysts and patients. For practical purposes, they open the range of interpretive and speculative readings of the actual psychoanalytic experience, again without reservation, to any myth or metaphor seriously invoked by any psychoanalyst or patient in the course of a particular therapeutic inquiry. In the context of changes of such magnitude, a perspective of psychic realism, without prejudice or prejudgment, allows for the indefinitely extended differences among psychoanalysts and patients, and supports their appeal to a growing pluralism of metapsychologies.