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Psychoanalysts have diagnosed confusions and problems in their discipline as originating in a conflict between mechanistic and nonmechanistic elements in Freud's concept of mind (Klein, 1976), between interpretation as “a subjective” discipline and prediction as an “objective” one (Wallerstein, 1985), between explanations in terms of reasons and in terms of causes (Schafer, 1976), between psychoanalysis as a humanistic and as a scientific discipline (Holt, 1981). But another, perhaps deeper, conflict between a Cartesian or first-person view of the mind on the one hand and what one might call an interpersonal view of the mind on the other has gone unremarked. This conflict is at the root of a number of issues within psychoanalysis, among them the relation between language and the unconscious, the status of psychoanalysis as a science, “narrative truth” and the objectivity of psychoanalytic interpretations, “psychic reality” and the ontological status of the “object,” and interactional versus separation/individuation models of development. In the light of the interpersonal view, furthermore, some of these issues and the dichotomies on which they turn become pseudoissues.