This paper belongs to a series of studies in which we have been attempting to transpose the central theoretical ideas of Freudian psychoanalysis into a metapsychology-free framework, a “psychoanalytic phenomenology,” which takes the subjective representational world (Sandler and Rosenblatt, 1962) as its principal construct and focus. These studies have been guided by the dual aim of preserving and clarifying the seminal clinical insights embedded in (and frequently obscured by) classical metapsychology, and of recasting them in a form that makes possible an articulation and integration of the psychoanalytic system with other theoretical points of view.

To these ends, we have proposed that the following components constitute the necessary and sufficient ingredients for a clinically meaningful psychoanalytic psychology of the representational world: (1) the distinctive configurations of self-and