Dynamic systems theory is a source of powerful new metaphors for psychoanalysis. Phenomena such as conflict, transference, resistance, and the unconscious itself are grasped from this perspective as dynamically emergent properties of self-organizing, nonlinear, dyadic, intersubjective systems. The conception of development as evolving and dissolving attractor states of intersubjective systems richly illuminates the processes of pattern formation and change in psychoanalysis. Effective interpretations are seen as perturbations of the therapeutic system that permit new organizing principles to come into being.