Shall the Twain Meet? Metaphor, Dissociation, and Cooccurrence

Abstract

Even when trauma can be remembered, the memory does not infuse the present with vitality or emotionality, as other memories do. To become a vital part of experience, trauma must be linked with other current experiences. Such links are metaphorical, in the sense meant by Lakoff and Johnson (1999). In metaphor, the meaning of a memory is carried over or transferred to a present experience. When such transfer takes place, trauma can be reflected on, because it can now be seen against the background of another experience. Transfer is made possible by cooccurrence, or the simultaneous presence in one's mind of a memory and a present experience. Such cooccurrences are potential metaphors; they can be actualized or refused. Modell (2003) tells us that this kind of refusal, common among trauma sufferers, prevents traumatic experience from becoming part of “emotional categories.” I refer to the unconscious refusal to tap the potential of cooccurrence—the unconscious refusal to create metaphor—as dissociation. This view of dissociation, and its breaching, is illustrated by a clinical vignette.

Notes

¹The work of Lakoff and Johnson is important for psychoanalysts for a number of reasons, only one of which has to do with a reevaluation of the significance of metaphor. Another contribution made by these authors is to offer a way of theorizing all experience to be based in the body (the title of their 1999 book is Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought) without resorting to a drive concept. However, as much as I appreciate their thinking and its potential contribution to psychoanalysis, I do not share their epistemological stance. It is true, in one respect, that Lakoff and Johnson do away with objectivism. They take the position that truth cannot exist in objective form in the world outside our minds because much of what we call truth, even most of it, is created in the shapes of the metaphors that we think with. The mind, therefore, has at least as much to do with shaping what we take to be truth as the objective world does. In fact, it does not make sense to refer to the world outside our minds, because mind and world are a unity. This far I can go, and even appreciate. I am thoroughly in agreement with Lakoff and Johnson's critique of Cartesianism.

But Lakoff and Johnson end up replacing one objectivism with another. They present their theory of metaphor as the new objective truth, one more theory meant to supplant those that have gone before. The problem of endlessly overturning one objective truth and substituting another is precisely what inspired the insights of hermeneutics and postmodernism. Given their presentation of their theory of metaphor as the new truth, it is not surprising that Lakoff and Johnson explicitly challenge postmodern, constructivist views.

²Metaphor and metonymy are two forms of symbolic representation. In metaphor, one object or concept stands for another. It is immaterial whether the two items bore any meaningful relation to one another prior to being incorporated in the metaphor, and so, if one does not know why the two terms came together, metaphor often appears arbitrary, like anise and grandmother. Metonymy differs from metaphor in that the two experiences, objects, or concepts are meaningfully related prior to becoming part of the metonymy. Usually the thing that is symbolized subsumes the thing that serves as the symbol, as in “Soldiers serve the flag” (a national flag stands for the entire country); or “The king has the scepter” (scepter stands for sovereignty). Metonymic relations result in categories in the same way that metaphoric ones do, but because their terms must bear a prior relationship to one another, metonymy is a less flexible means of symbolization. The mere temporal coincidence of the terms, what I will call cooccurrence later in this article, is sufficient to create the potential for metaphor.

³This expression is an approximation. Although we cannot control what our minds do, we can prepare ourselves, by immersing ourselves in our field of study or practice, thereby making it more likely that the cooccurrences available to our minds are relevant to the problems we face.

⁴Metonymy, therefore, because it does not originate in cooccurrence, is apparently irrelevant to the line of thought I am developing about metaphor (see footnote 2).

⁵This line of work was pioneered by Harry Stack Sullivan and developed into a psychoanalytic perspective by Philip Bromberg (1998, 2006) and others (Mitchell, 1993; Davies, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004; Davies and Frawley, 1991, 1994; Stern, 1997, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2009; Howell, 2005).