In a brief beginning section, the authors review their work toward the elimination of metapsychology and its replacement by a "psychoanalytic phenomenology." Various aspects of the representational world comprise the necessary elements of this psychology, including specific configurations of self and object, developmental tasks, and conscious and unconscious motivations. The authors further assert that the "need to maintain the organization of experience is a central motivational principle in the patterning of human conduct." This fundamental relationship between experience and conduct is the stated focus for the clinical material presented later in the paper. The disappearance of the self-destructive symptoms this patient presented is conceptualized as the effect of the patient's reliance on the therapist as a "self-object," which resulted in the maintenance of her psychological organization as a stable, cohesive, and embodied self.