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Psychoanalytic theories that try to fit our knowledge of what is therapeutically useful to what is known about the mind from cognate disciplines aim to arrive at a meaningful theory of treatment from among competing explanatory alternatives. Especially with the explosion of knowledge in cognitive science and neuroscience, a biologically sound metapsychology for psychoanalysis has been advocated by an accumulating number of theoreticians across differing schools of psychoanalytic thought. Endeavoring to replace Freud's metapsychology, modeled on energetics, with one compatible with contemporary information from neurobiology, cognitive science, and developmental research, they favor psychoanalytic concepts that both fit the observations of the psychoanalytic situation and conform to knowledge from these related disciplines, so as to make possible a basis for understanding why and how particular analytic principles and techniques are valid and effective (Gedo, 1999). Freud (1937) himself had been similarly committed to the evolution of “metapsychological … theorizing,” without which, he said, “we shall not get another step forward” in advancing psychoanalysis as a body of knowledge and therapeutic discipline (p. 225).
This paper recognizes the possible incremental metapsychological value of recent psychoanalytic contributions on the subject of metaphor, which incorporate important psychoeconomic emendations. The accent in this paper is on the unconscious meta-phoric