Abstract

The last decades have seen a growing interest in the status, legitimacy, place, and function of metaphors, playing out in psychoanalytic language. While the founders of psychoanalysis maintained that their concepts denoted actual revelations and objective facts, contemporary psychoanalysts believe that psychoanalytical concepts are metaphors, and do not reflect objective facts or universal truths. But if psychoanalytic concepts are no more than alternating metaphors, as may follow from Nietzsche’s well-known truth definition, what kind of stability can be expected of psychoanalytic knowledge?