Freud named the description of the mental process based on local, dynamic, and economic schemas as metapsychology. These are, we would say, supervisory means, rhetorical conventions that help to represent, highlight, and "speak" about what was, by definition, at that time, and continues to be, almost elusive, inconceivable, and unarticulated, namely the human psyche and its processes, especially when these are unconscious.

Thus, the "Essays on Metapsychology" attempt to establish and clarify at a broader theoretical and reflective level the fundamental concepts on which the research and therapeutic practice of the father of psychoanalysis are based, which attests to its profound philosophical nature. Such concepts include drive, the unconscious, repression, dreams through the lens of metapsychological schemas, mourning, and melancholy.

“When, culminating his self-criticism, [the melancholic] presents himself as petty, selfish, unjust, dependent, someone whose only action has been to hide the weaknesses of his existence, he may have reached, as far as we know, very close to self-knowledge, so we will merely wonder why one must first become ill in order to approach such a truth.” (Sigmund Freud)