The author considers the clinical use of metaphor—when psychoanalytic psychotherapists move intentionally to figurative and comparative language in talking with their patients—by comparing it to the use of metaphor in poetry. Both poets and psychoanalysts, despite the differences in the aims of their arts, rely on this way of speaking in order to evoke, discover, and create meaning. A consideration of the way therapists use metaphors sheds some light on essential clinical processes—and on the current debate between “classical” and “postmodern” ways of understanding what psychoanalysts do.