Metaphor as Conflict, Conflict as Metaphor

Abstract

This article deals with a double idea: Metaphor itself, by bridging two domains of experience, lives in the tension, even contradictoriness, of what it brings together, and in that way may be uniquely suited to present a theory of mental life that centers on inner polarities and antitheses, i.e., inner conflict in a wide sense, not necessarily bound to the drive or structural metaphors. In turn, the concept of conflict itself entails a spectrum of warlike or violent metaphors, such as defense, antitheses, clashing values or forces, being torn or broken apart, inner part personalities fighting with each other, etc. The history of the metaphors for various forms of inner conflict are traced back in Western and Eastern literature (Homer, Plato, the Bible, the Talmud, St. Augustine, Confucius, and Lao Tzu), thus broadening the search for a common ground for psychoanalytic perspectives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In 1977, I published my paper in the Quarterly defending the use of metaphor in psychoanalytic theory formation against the attacks by Schafer (1973), Holt (1975), Kubie (1960, 1978), and others (see Wallerstein, this issue). This article does not repeat what has been presented there but is based on its main ideas.

Notes

Léon Wurmser is a training and supervising analyst, New York Freudian society.

¹ Lao Tzu, 1981, ch. 70.

²“Die Person, von der Seite des Charakters betrachtet, soll: sie ist beschränkt, zu einem Besonderen bestimmt; als Mensch aber will sie. Sie ist unbegrenzt und fordert das Allgemeine. Hier entspringt schon ein innerer Konflikt, und diesen läßt Shakespeare vor allen anderen heraustreten” (Goethe, 1961, p. 186).

³“Ein Wollen, das über die Kräfte eines Individuums hinausgeht, ist modern” (Goethe, 1961, p. 22).

⁴ Li is variably translated as propriety, beauty, holy ritual, sacred ceremony, used as metaphor for “the entire body of mores, or more precisely, of the authentic tradition and reasonable conventions of society,” as Fingarette (1972, pp. 6–7) defines it.

⁵Better by Waley: Only he who has accepted the dirt of the country can be lord of its soil-shrines; Chan Wing-Tsit (1967): He who suffers disgrace for his country is called the lord of the land.

⁶Waley: can become a king among those what dwell under heaven.

⁷Waley: Straight words seem crooked [seem, as we would say, to be paradoxes]; Chan Wing-Tsit (1967): Straight words seem to be their opposite.

⁸“Diese mannigfachen Gestalten der Gegensätze benutzt nun Laotse, um im Widerschein das Unsagbare sagbar zu machen, das Sein im Nichtsein, das Wissen im Nichtwissen, das Tun im Nichttun” (Jaspers, 1957, p. 926).

⁹Aristotle's (1927, p. 2) insight: “All men naturally desire knowledge,” the beginning sentence of the Metaphysics.