Metapsychology is what Freud called the description of the psychological process based on topographical, dynamic, and economic formations. These are visual, so to speak, rhetorical conventions that help represent, highlight, and "speak" what was inherently, and continues to be, almost inconceivable, unthinkable, and inexpressible, namely the human psyche and its processes, especially when they are unconscious.

Thus, the "Essays on Metapsychology" attempt to establish and clarify on a more general theoretical and reflective level the basic concepts on which the research and therapeutic practice of the father of psychoanalysis are based, which testifies to its profound philosophical nature. Such concepts include instinct, the unconscious, repression, the dream under the prism of metapsychological formations, mourning, and melancholy.