The article is devoted to the study of metaphorical processes in the German professional language of psychology. On the basis of the linguocognitive approach, scientific research of the main type of secondary nomination was carried out, as well as the establishment of donor areas for the creation of new terms. Interest in the study of metaphorization in various terminological systems has been growing in recent years. A wide range of linguists devoted the works to metaphorical phenomena in the terminologies of different professional languages (T. M. Halai (geology), A. P. Chudinov (politics), Y. I. Hrybinyk (geodesy and cadastre), M. M. Teleki), O. V. Petrenko (robotics), V. V. Lelyukh (oil and gas industry)), but the processes of metaphorization in the German professional language of psychology have not yet been the object of scientific research, which determines the relevance of research based on the principles of application general scientific (induction, deduction) and special methods and techniques of analysis of linguistic material. The material was a set of metaphorized psychological terms, carried out by the method of continuous sampling. In the first stage the process of selection of metaphorical term units was carried out, the descriptive method and semantic-component analysis were also applied; at the second stage the analysis of spheres-sources for fixing of donor spheres of German language for specific purposes of psychology is carried out; at the third stage the distributive analysis is used – for definition and the description of the semantic structure of the investigated terms; quantitative analysis was used to determine the frequency of the studied phenomena. The paper also uses the techniques of observation, generalization, interpretation, modeling, and systematization. The results of the study show that the term formation in the modern German professional language of psychology is based on the fields of human knowledge and experience, through the prism of which psychological phenomena and phenomena are considered. Donor zones of metaphorization are established: anthropomorphic, proprial, mythological, natural morphological, artifact, meteorological, and zones of other branch terminological systems (chemical, physical, geographical, mathematical, economic, historical, philological). Dominant donor spheres are anthropomorphic, proprial, and zoomorphic.