The history of psychoanalysis has been dogged by the need to find a conceptual location for its theory. Is psychoanalysis, as Freud hoped it would be, a new science, or is it a special branch of psychology? Does it or should it conform to the model of natural science or of social science? Or is it not a science at all, but rather a canon for the interpretation of hidden meaning, a hermeneutic? These questions have been endlessly thrashed out, and without resolution. Some have taken the lack of theoretical closure as evidence for a basic defect in psychoanalytic theory. Another alternative, however, is possible, for new ideas as well as important lines of clarification of existing ones generally emerge from the most obdurate theoretical tangles. What seems nigh-insoluble is where theoretical opportunity lies. The present essay is written out of this persuasion. It will proceed as follows: first a summary of the theoretical impasse concerning the state of psychoanalytic metapsychology, along with a critique of some main positions