Recently, psychoanalytic writers have discovered and appropriated the distinction between motive (or reason) and cause found in certain philosophical writings. In the psychoanalytic literature, this distinction has been made in the service of a parallel one drawn between the clinical theory and metapsychology. Although the nature of and basis for the latter distinction are not always entirely clear, the general idea is that the clinical theory deals with such matters as intentions, wishes, reasons, and motives, while metapsychology presumably deals with the mechanisms underlying those phenomena. The assumption is that in his clinical theory Freud dealt with phenomena observed in the actual psychoanalytic situation and concepts closely tied to that situation, while in his metapsychology he attempted to explain these phenomena in what he considered to be scientifically