For more than a decade now, theoretical writing in psychoanalysis—at least in America—has been preoccupied with what I have come to call “the great metapsychology debate.” “Leading psychoanalytic theoreticians, some of them once colleagues and collaborators of Heinz Hartmann and David Rapaport, those chief architects of modern-day ego psychology in its fullest American development, have called for the wholesale reconsideration, the major revision (albeit along widely different parameters) and, even in the extreme, the total elimination, of the whole fabric of metapsychology as an inherently flawed and doomed effort to (inappropriately) create a “general” (and natural science-linked) theory of psychoanalysis where only a “special” or totally clinical theory can be properly sustained by the psychoanalytic data. Needless to say, other theoreticians have equally vigorously defended the metapsychological or the general-theoretical structure of psychoanalysis on a variety of heuristic, utilitarian, or more comprehensively philosophy-of-science grounds. Curiously,