Psychoanalytic reconstructions of primitive mental states describe the infant's fears of “falling forever” and dread of an “endless void,” along with fantasies of omnipotent control. The author suggests that such primitive anxieties represent the result of an evolutionary loss that was visited upon our species as we hovered between nonhuman primate and human being. It is, the author observes, an essential feature of our species that we must turn away from the concrete in favor of a metaphoric engagement with self and other and she proposes a theory of why this is so. Condensing evolutionary time, she creates a myth-like narrative to show how metaphoric thinking might reasonably have become, through the processes of natural selection and adaptation, critical to the survival of our species.