Metaphor in Psychoanalysis: Bane or Blessing?

Abstract

Since the 1980 book, The Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson, the cognitive–linguistic view of metaphor that they propound has come to be most widely accepted. Its characteristic features are that (a) metaphor is a property of the concept, not the words; (b) its function is to heighten understanding, not simply artistic or aesthetic; (c) it is often not based on similarity; (d) it is ubiquitous in ordinary language, not requiring special talent; and (e) it is an inevitable intrinsic aspect of all human thought and language. This is true of all speech, including the speech in and of psychoanalysis. Metaphor both amplifies and creates meaning. But it can also be misleading and produce conceptual errors of meaning. It should, therefore, not be reified or always taken literally, but should remain flexible and alterable, so that heuristically more relevant and more encompassing metaphor can readily be elaborated.

Acknowledgment

This article has profited from discussion with Adam Bessie, a college teacher of English, and a student of metaphor, and also from discussion with some of the members of a professional study group—Terry Becker, Daphne de Marneffe, Dianne Elise, Sam Gerson, Peter Goldberg, Deborah Melman, Shelley Nathans, Harvey Peskin, Tzipi Perskin, Judy Wallerstein, Carolyn Wilson, and Mitchell Wilson.

Notes

Robert S. Wallerstein, M.D., is Emeritus Professor, and former chair, Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, and Emeritus Training and Supervising analyst, San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.

¹Schafer's cause did achieve significant literary support when Susan Sontag (1978), caught up with her own cancer, published a polemical essay decrying the dangers caused by the all-too-ready willingness to make mysterious and dreaded illnesses, like tuberculosis and cancer, and also others (leprosy, syphilis, and insanity) into “morally, if not literally contagious” (p. 6) happenings. With bountiful references from world literature, Sontag described the long romanticization of tuberculosis into an ailment of talented aesthetes, “the sign of a superior nature” (p. 34; e.g., Shelley and Keats), or cancer as a failure of expressiveness, reflecting the repression of violent feelings by life's losers. “Contrariwise, my point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking” (p. 3). Rather than being the bearer of secret (and often shameful) taboos, disease is an “ineluctably material reality” (p. 56). And in a wholesale assault on any hint of psychosomatic thinking, “Psychological theories of illness are a powerful means of placing the blame on the ill. Patients, who are instructed that they have, unwittingly caused their disease are also being made to feel that they have deserved it” (p. 57). And that, of course, can be a danger of metaphor!

²For further striking examples of the use of flagrant metaphor in clinical psychoanalysis, the reader can consult Aleksandrowicz (1962), Reider (1972), and Voth (1970). For somewhat more theoretical conceptualizations, see Lewin (1970, 1971) and Sharpe (1940).

³The risks in concretizing metaphor, and taking it literally, can be very real and can do great harm. When I entered psychiatry in 1949, the lobotomy operation was still being employed for the mitigation of the psychotic structure in instances of severe, and chronic, paranoid schizophrenia. At a hospital lobotomy conference that I knew, the lobotomy was explained and justified by the conception that the ego resided in the frontal cortex, and the turbulent id in the thalamus, so that surgically severing the thalamo-cortical projections, would release the weakened ego from the tyranny of the overpowering, chaotic id. This formulation was advanced by the psychoanalytic consultant. An extreme and tragic instance of the risks of concretized metaphor!

⁴The earlier widely noted 1964 article by William Grossman and Bennett Simon made essentially the same argument as Wurmser (1977), but under the more narrowly focused conception of anthropomorphism in psychoanalysis, rather than Wurmser's umbrella of metaphor.

⁵ Freud (1914a) stated there, “the facts of transference and of resistance. Any line of investigation which recognizes these two facts and takes them as the starting point of its work has a right to call itself psycho-analysis, even though it arrives at results other than my own. But anyone who takes up other sides of the problem while ignoring these two hypotheses will hardly escape a charge of misappropriation of property by attempted impersonation, if he persists in calling himself a psycho-analyst” (p. 16). Of course, I must add here that the key words transference and resistance also imply the concepts of the unconscious, of psychic conflict, and of defense and compromise formation, the key building stones of our shared psychoanalytic edifice. And, of course, modern conceptions of the place and use of countertransference must be included. Further along in this History, Freud (1914a) elaborates this same definitional statement, using much the same words.

⁶For a detailed explanation of this situation in physics, I refer the reader to the two general explanatory books by the Columbia University theoretical physicist and string theory researcher, Brian Greene (1999, 2004).