The Meaning and Use of Metaphor in Analytic Field Theory

Abstract

Each of the principal psychoanalytic models is underlain by certain key metaphors. For example, the archaeological and surgical metaphors, as well as that of the analyst-as-screen, all throw light on some of Freud's basic concepts. In classical psychoanalysis, however, metaphor still tends to be an illegitimate or secondary element. Analytic field theory, on the other hand, reserves a completely different place for it, both as an instrument of technique in clinical work and as a conceptual device in theoretical activity. Metaphor and the field are linked in a chiasm: The field metaphor transforms Kleinian relational theory into a radically intersubjective theory, which, in turn, places metaphor at a point along the spectrum of dreaming—to paraphrase Bion, it is the stuff of analysis. For the sake of illustration, we examine first the origins and meaning of the field metaphor in analytic field theory; we then consider the mutual implications of this particular development of post-Bion psychoanalysis and the modern linguistic theory of metaphor; and, finally, we put the theoretical hypotheses discussed in the first part of this contribution to work in the clinical situation.

Notes

Giuseppe Civitarese, MD, PhD and Antonino Ferro, MD are both with the Italian Psychoanalytic Society (SPI).

¹The Barangers also took inspiration from Kurt Lewin, Heinrich Racker, and Enrique Pichon Rivière (de León de Bernardi, 2008). Churcher (2008) pointed out that Lewin's name is replaced by that of Merleau-Ponty in the second, revised version of the Barangers’ 1961–1962 paper as republished in 1969.

²Translator's note: For convenience, the masculine form is used for both sexes throughout this translation.

³The lectures delivered at the Sorbonne in the 1950–1951 academic year, “The Child's Relation With Others” (published in English in 1964), demonstrated Merleau-Ponty's familiarity with Klein's works. Klein used the concept of projective identification as the basis of an intersubjective theory of the psyche that was both extraordinarily advanced and in some respects complementary to that of Merleau-Ponty. According to Angelino (2005, p. 374, translated), Melanie Klein fascinated Merleau-Ponty “because her writings are rich in highly concrete, indeed brutal, and quite shocking descriptions of our relations with others and with things, which bear out what he thought about the role of corporeality and the drives (libido and aggression) in our relationship with the world.”Klein studied in detail, to a degree bordering on obsession, the mechanisms of the first introjections/projections and identifications of a child when still immersed in a state of partial nondistinction from the object. Klein, admittedly, accepted the existence of a primitive ego from birth, but, as Kristeva (2000, p. 62f.) noted, “The fragile ego is not truly separated in the sense of a ‘subject’ separated from an ‘object,’ but it incessantly consumes the breast from within and ejects the breast into the outside world by constructing-vacating itself while constructing-vacating the Other.”The point, however, is that Klein's model proves valuable not only for representing the relationship between the subject and his environment at the stage described by Freud as that of primary narcissism, but also when the subject is no longer in such an elementary phase of constitution of the ego.Like Klein, Merleau-Ponty considered that identity can be thought of only in terms of difference, of the intersection between the subject's body and the world of things and other people. A person can be himself only by projecting himself outside his own self into the other, and vice versa. The subject (S) constructs himself only by transferring himself into the object (O), which is thereby transformed (O′), and by then reintrojecting from the object what he had deposited in it, thereby in turn being modified (S′); the structure of the chiasm—the resulting notation seems to allude ironically to a kind of appeal to the other—would be SOO′S′.Hence, the approaches of Klein and Merleau-Ponty can be seen as complementary. Oddly enough, because Klein was interested mainly in the unconscious and in psychic reality, she in effect disregarded the carnal—feeling and felt—aspect of the body (even though the body is absolutely the protagonist of the subject's unconscious fantasies). Merleau-Ponty's concentration on the experience of the body, on the other hand, lead him to develop theories very close to current notions of the unrepressed, or sensory, unconscious and of procedural, rather than declarative, memories.

⁴Cf. Baranger M (2005, p. 62f.): “It was when we reviewed Bion's studies on small groups that we modified and added precision to our thinking in a direction different from transference–countertransference interaction. … We then understood that the field is much more than interaction and intersubjective relations. … Translating what is described as the group's ‘basic assumption’ to the individual analytic situation, we spoke of the ‘basic unconscious phantasy’ that emerges in the analytic situation, created by the same field situation. … This phantasy is not the sum or combination of the individual fantasies of the two members of the analytic couple, but an original set of fantasies created by the field situation itself. It emerges in the process of the analytic situation and has no existence outside the field situation, although it is rooted in the unconscious of the members.”

⁵However, consider the following passage from Bion's letter to Rickman of March 7, 1943: “The more I look at it the more it seems to me that some very serious work needs to be done along analytical and field theory lines to elucidate.” (Conci, in press). The article published in The Lancet in 1943 and signed by both, “Intra-group tensions in therapy—Their study as the task of the group”(which subsequently became the first chapter of Experiences in Groups (Bion, 1948), contains what is clearly a field theory (Civitarese, in press-a). Lacan (1947) had no hesitation in describing this article as miraculous!

⁶ Kojève (1947, p. 43) concisely summed up Hegel's conception of the subject as follows: “If they are to be human, they must be at least two in number.”

⁷Cf. Eco (1984, p. 87): metaphor “A trope that seems to be the most primary will appear instead as the most derivative, as the result of a semantic calculus that presupposes other preliminary semiotic operations. A curious situation for a figure of speech that has been recognized by many to be the basis of every other.”

⁸Translator's note: Literally horseshoes, but the Italian word is also the plural of ferro, the name of the analyst and one of the authors of this article.

⁹New metaphors are among the “mutations” that cause a scientific paradigm to evolve (Kuhn, 1962).

¹⁰Translator's note: The Italian word grasso can mean either grease or fat.