Metaphor; the impossible translation?

Wings

The butterfly's wings are becoming so heavy they touch

the ground almost, they hit the hawthorn and get thrown

sideways by the spray from the waterfall miles away.

They no longer fold into land only fall splayed. The perceiving

of what was familiar needs impossible translation. Every field

rolling green has its beautiful crashed aeroplane.

David Hart

Summary

The linguistic concept 'metaphor' has an established place in clinical as well as theoretical

psychotherapy. It has been seen as either analogous to or even fundamental to the analytic

concept of transference. Metaphors have been thought to have a special role in enhancing

therapist-patient communications. By contrast, in linguistics itself, metaphor has been

relatively neglected, viewed as irrelevant and unscientific. That conventional approach to

metaphor has recently been challenged by Contemporary Metaphor Theory.

This new theory suggests that language depends upon a largely unconscious system of

conventional metaphor. Our bodily experiences are the basis of our understanding of

abstract concepts such as emotions and relationships. Novel and imaginative metaphors

build upon this fundamental biological structure.

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The traditional approach placed metaphor, along with rhetoric, and by inference,

psychodynamic thinking, at the periphery of science. Cognitive linguistic research is now

showing that language is fundamentally structured by metaphorical processes, which

enhances the scientific status of psychoanalysis and supports and extends the view of

metaphor as at the heart of language and meaning.

Introduction

Over recent years references to metaphor in the psychotherapy literature have testified to

the special role of metaphor in therapist communications (Kopp 1995, Cox & Theilgaard

1997, Ogden 1997, Barker 1996) or have used the concept of metaphor as an analogue for

transference (Holmes 1985). Metaphor is usually defined, in established terminology, as a

special linguistic device in which one thing is described as if it is another. In a tradition that

can be traced back through the centuries to Aristotle, the metaphorical is opposed to the

literal. It is a proper part of poetry and rhetoric. Its function is to create novel meanings that

inspire, and disturb by changing our perspective on reality. The Twentieth century's

fascination with literalism and science, however, relegated metaphor to an intellectual

second division.

Psychotherapy, with its emphasis on the symbolic unconscious did not find a problem with

this. Whilst linguistics was aiming to become increasingly 'scientific', following Chomsky's

lead in emphasising syntax and seeking a Universal Grammar (Chomsky 1957, Moore &

Carling 1982), psychotherapy continued to embrace the tragedy and romance of narrative.

Psychotherapists resisted the complaint of Popperian scientism that metaphor was not

'literal' or 'objective'. If scientism decreed that only that which could be described in literal

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terms made 'sense', then psychotherapy was left to stand up for the importance of

'nonsense'.

More recently, the science of linguistics has moved on, leaving behind Chomsky's emphasis

on grammar to retake the no-man's land of meaning, semantics. Since 1980, a growing

number of linguists have been attempting to elucidate the ways in which language reflects

the manner in which human beings perceive, categorise and conceptualise the world. The

result has been the birth of a new discipline, cognitive linguistics (Trask 1999).

For cognitive linguists, metaphor is no longer just a special, non-literal, unscientific rhetorical

technique, the private province of poets. It is fundamental to all human thought.

Psychoanalysts had already been struggling with the paradox this raises. Archard (1984

p71) said “If it is objected that the use of metaphor is a function of an already acquired

language, and that it is we as language users, who construct metaphors, Lacan can

respond that metaphor is an inherent feature of language, one of its fundamental axes.

Nevertheless, in depicting accession to language as a metaphoric process we are left with

the uncomfortable question: Which comes first, language or metaphor?”

Contemporary metaphor theory suggests that language is structured by the use of

metaphors based primarily on our bodily experiences. Among the early contributors to this

movement were the American theoretical linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark

Johnson. Lakoff (1987) views metaphor as singularly important in shaping how languages

develop. Johnson (1987) emphasises the fundamental role of the body as the supplier of

schemas that inform the metaphors we live by. By returning to the emphasis on semantics

which inspired Lacan, cognitive linguists are exploring and offering their own unique

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perspective on the symbolic unconscious. Contemporary Metaphor Theory (Lakoff 1993)

explores how language is derived from we might call primary process symbolism. The

psychoanalytic insight that metaphors can penetrate the depths of a patient's unconscious

is part of the academic mainstream again.

'The perceiving of what was familiar needs impossible translation.'

David Hart's poem (Hart 1998) appears self-conscious of its hyperbolic metaphor. A

butterfly falling to the ground is an aeroplane crashing. A metaphor is, essentially, one thing

described as if it were another. The metaphor turns a deceptively simple pastoral poem into

an exploration of inordinate sorrow. This is poetic metaphor giving a unique insight into the

experience of emotional disturbance. Cox and Theilgaard, (1997 p138) quoting Bowra claim

that, in psychotherapy, 'There is still a place for poetry because it does something that

nothing else will do'. They offer a statement made by a schizophrenic patient;

''I'm blind because I see too much, so I study by a dark lamp''

and conclude 'this is the poetic, archaic language of a chronic schizophrenic. And it does

several things that nothing else can do.'

But how does this statement achieve its effect? Andrew Ortony, in his submission to the

Oxford Companion to the Mind (Gregory 1987), posed the following question,

'Does the comprehension of metaphors involve special processes not normally involved in

the comprehension of literal language?'

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Ortony (1993 p2) summarised the traditional, non-psychoanalytic, non-constructivist

position as one which

'treats metaphors as rather unimportant, deviant and parasitic on 'normal usage'. …

Metaphors characterise rhetoric, not scientific discourse. They are vague, inessential frills,

appropriate for the purposes of politicians and poets, but not for those of scientists because

the goal of science is to furnish an accurate (i.e. literal) description of literal reality.'

By contrast, from the constructivist perspective of cognitive linguists, because

'meaning has to be constructed rather than directly perceived, the meaning of non-literal

uses of language does not constitute a special problem. The use of language is an

essentially creative activity, as is its comprehension. Metaphors and other figures of speech

may sometimes require a little more creativity than literal language, but the difference is

quantitative rather than qualitative.' (Ortony 1993 p2) Moreover, the constructivist doubts

that there is a fundamental difference between the objective, literal language of science and

the creative, non-literal language of the poet. (Kuhn 1993)

This change of perspective in the scientific community came about as a result of detailed

work by linguists and anthropologists. Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work 'Metaphors we

live by' (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) provided an accessible introduction to this field. Their

focus was not on poetic metaphor, but on the metaphors of every day life. Why, for

example, do we say 'I am in love.' What is there to get 'in'? Moreover, how do we manage to

'fall out of love'? What is it we are getting 'out' of? In the English language an emotional

state, a nebulous concept, is being treated as if it were a container. By scrupulous

5
examination of the language, idioms and 'dead' metaphor of everyday life, Lakoff and

Johnson provided compelling evidence for their hypothesis that metaphor is pervasive in

everyday language, thought and action.

They began their book, understandably, by examining in detail the concept ARGUMENT

and the conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. They did this by referring to a large

number of conventional expressions, of which, for reasons of space, I can only give a very

few examples

Your claims are indefensible

He attacked every weak point in my argument

I've never won an argument with him

That is not to say an argument is only conceptualised in terms of war. AN ARGUMENT IS A

JOURNEY.

We have set out to show that metaphor is fundamental to human thought.

And since A JOURNEY DEFINES A PATH

You've lost me there.

An ARGUMENT DEFINES A PATH

Did you follow that?

Through field research, Lakoff and his colleagues have collected large numbers of

metaphorical expressions. Analysis of these has led them to believe that they are derived

from a smaller number of conceptual metaphors . These conceptual metaphors are the

roots on which creative, novel metaphors as well as 'dead' conventional metaphors draw.

Each conceptual metaphor is a schema, a basic line drawing. Metaphorical expressions

take some detail from the schema and colour it in for greater immediacy of effect. For each

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of the conceptual metaphors I have given below there are many more metaphorical

expressions.

TIME IS MONEY (Can you spare me five minutes?, I spent too much time on that.).

ACTIVITIES ARE CONTAINERS (How did you get out of doing the washing up? He was in

the middle of writing.)

KNOWING IS SEEING (Do you see what I mean? What is your view on that?)

THE PART IS THE WHOLE (We need some new blood in this organisation. The head of the

company.)

ATTRIBUTES ARE OBJECTS (He caught a terrible cold. She got fatter and fatter.)

EVENTS ARE ACTIONS (The deceased passed over, The child came into the world.)

(Lakoff 1987,1993, Lakoff & Johnson 1980,1999)

For Lakoff, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualise

one mental domain in terms of another (Lakoff 1993). This is what he means by metaphor,

and which I have, following his convention, written in capitals. The examples I have given in

italics are thought of as metaphorical expressions. Conventionally, conceptual metaphors

are written as TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN. The Target is the subject under

discussion. The Source is the, usually more, concrete concept from which we draw

inferences about the Target. For example the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEAT gives

rise to such expressions as 'don't get hot under the collar', 'my blood boiled', 'I just needed

to let off steam'. The conceptual metaphor ANGER IS A DANGEROUS ANIMAL gives rise

to expressions such as 'she bit my head off', 'don't get your hackles up'. The conceptual

metaphors that we use to make sense of an abstract concept, such as an emotion, are

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deduced by analysing large collections of metaphorical expressions and deriving the

schematic images which have given rise to them.

[NOTE; This notation should not be confused with that used by Kopp (1995). In his system 'metaphorms' are

capitalized. Metaphorms are individual metaphoric expressions that Kopp considers structure the patient's

view of himself and the world. Conceptual metaphors, by contrast, are derived by analysing a large number of

such individual expressions from a wide range of individual sources.]

As a general principle, in trying to make sense of an abstract concept, such as an argument,

an activity, an emotional state, or time, we reason by transferring information from a more

concrete domain. These metaphors are so familiar that we are no longer aware of them as

such. They are called 'dead' metaphors. It is only when we extend the metaphor further than

is conventional that we find novel or live metaphor. It is conventional to talk about an

ARGUMENT AS A JOURNEY. We might criticise a speaker at a conference by whispering

to our neighbour 'He's going all over the place'. If we were to say 'He's wandered so far off

the point that he'll need a passport to get back into the country', it is a joke. But this joke

does not create a novel metaphor out of thin air. It uses the conceptual metaphor an

ARGUMENT IS A JOURNEY but takes a detail of the JOURNEY (the need for a passport)

which is not usually used in thinking about an ARGUMENT. This is imaginative metaphor,

and it does something that conventional metaphor does not do.

Emotions were once thought, by philosophers, to be devoid of conceptual content. Lakoff's

analysis of idiomatic language shows that 'emotions have an extremely complex conceptual

structure, which give rise to a wide variety of nontrivial inferences.' (Lakoff 1987). Lakoff's

research analysed an extensive list of idiomatic English terms used to describe anger to

derive a small number of fundamental schematic metaphors. They showed that the general

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metonymic principle THE WHOLE IS A PART underlies the way that the physiological

effects of anger, that is, going red in the face, sweating, trembling, feeling hot, are used to

stand for the emotion, as in, for example "I am boiling over". These common physiological

experiences give rise to the conceptual metaphor ANGER IS HEAT. When this is combined

with another common conceptual metaphor THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE

EMOTIONS, it gives rise to ANGER IS THE HEAT OF A FLUID IN A CONTAINER. The

folk theory of the physiological effects of anger thus forms the basis of the most general

conceptual metaphor for anger, leading to colourful expressions such as "She was

steaming!"

For psychotherapists, many of the above may well resonate with theories that are more

familiar to us. The idea that emotional states and containers are linked is well established in

the literature. We may well wonder whether there is anything new that we can learn from

this way of analysing language.

A clinical example

A woman is being assessed for her suitability for psychodynamic psychotherapy. She has

been referred with longstanding obesity which is currently threatening to destroy her

marriage. She is ambivalent about therapy. She tells the assessor

'The only problem I can see is my fatness. It's getting bigger and bigger. It gets in the way of

everything.'

Later in the same session, having become more open about her depression and the

unhappiness in her marriage, she says

'My fatness obscures everything good about me.'

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This statement contains conventional metaphors. The quality of the patient's body, its

fatness, is seen as if it were an object, as Lakoff says, ATTRIBUTES ARE OBJECTS. This

object is not transparent, it is capable of blocking someone's vision. Since KNOWING IS

SEEING, we already intuit that the observer cannot know this woman's good qualities. The

patient has projected her fatness outside herself and it is preventing others from knowing

her essential goodness.

During the assessment process it became clear that this patient projects her capacity to

control her eating into others. She is outwardly compliant and views her self as greedy. Her

needy, deprived and grieving inner self remains obscure to herself and others. The

mechanism of projecting a screen, a False Self, to prevent her True Self being known,

which became clearer through the assessment process, is already present in this

conceptual metaphors that structure this fragment of speech.

Transference

The transference of information from one domain to another is fundamental to

psychotherapy. Holmes (1985) considers that 'the basis of transference … is finding

similarities, analogies and parallels between the therapist-patient relationship and (the

patient's) external and early situations.' Thus, transference can be seen a form of

metaphorical communication in which the domain of the patient's current relationship and

the domain of his remembered past are used as both target and source.

In metaphor theory, what constitutes a conceptual metaphor, such as ATTRIBUTES ARE

OBJECTS is not any particular word or expression.

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'It is the ontological mapping across conceptual domains, from the source domain [an object

held in front of the body] to the target domain [the quality of fatness]. The metaphor is not

just a matter of language, but of thought and reason. The language is secondary. The

mapping is primary, in that it sanctions the use of source domain language and inference

patterns for target domain concepts. The mapping is conventional, that is, it is a fixed part of

our conceptual system, one of our conventional ways of conceptualising [bodily attributes].'

(Lakoff 1993 p208) Likewise, patterns of interpersonal behaviour, , such as hiding behind a

compliant False Self have, are a fixed part of the patient's conceptual system. They are the

conventional metaphors which she lives by and of which she is largely unaware.

When a conceptual metaphor has been so fully accepted into common culture, or into a

patient's unconscious assumptions, that its expressions are largely dead, then it becomes

difficult to argue that we should understand the target any other way. An example of this is

the conceptual metaphor TIME IS MONEY, which has become so institutionalised in our

society that most people are paid by the hour and employees, however productive, who

skive off for a cigarette are castigated for 'wasting time'.

The metaphorical expressions used in psychotherapy, such as 'False Self' provide a

language by means of which the therapist can help the patient explore their unconscious

experience. The metaphorical expressions of psychotherapy themselves draw on

conceptual metaphors. For example the ESSENTIAL SELF METAPHOR, gives rise to

conventional expressions such as 'her sophistication is a façade', 'she's sweet on the

outside', 'the iron hand in the velvet glove'. (Lakoff &Johnson1999) By using the language of

psychotherapy the therapist makes these unconscious assumptions, fossilised in common

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clichés, come alive. The therapist is drawing on the power of poetry and rhetoric to change

the patient's conscious appreciation of an otherwise familiar world.

Mappings

The observation that the Source is not chosen randomly, but has been selected because it

is in some way apt, has led Lakoff to propose that the mappings, from source to target, are,

in metaphor theory, governed by rules. One of these is the 'Invariance Principle'.

'Metaphorical mappings preserve the cognitive topology (that is, the image-schema

structure) of the source domain, in a way consistent with the inherent structure of the target

domain.' (Lakoff 1993) When the mapping from source to target observes the 'invariance

principle' the match can appear so perfect that the metaphor is taken for objective truth.

It has been said that 'Both metaphor and a solar eclipse enlighten' (Muran & DiGuiseppe

1990). This sentence relies upon a complex image metaphor. A metaphor is a Source used

to define and describe a Target, like a pattern laid on cloth. It is thus one object laid over

another, like an eclipse is the moon in front of the sun. The moon, the Source, is the more

concrete concept. The sun is the Target, something abstract we wish to understand more

fully, but which we cannot examine with our ordinary sense, the naked eye. There are

aspects of a more abstract concept that become able to be understood (the implicit Source

being solar flares and so on) only when a more concrete concept (here the moon, more

usually PATHS, OBJECTS, SEEING) mediates. The choice of a celestial image is

particularly apt in that it is determined by the conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING.

This conceptual metaphor is behind the use of the word enlighten. Generally speaking,

what we see to happen we know to have happened. The conceptual metaphor KNOWING

IS SEEING can be mistaken for objective truth, an error relied upon by stage magicians.

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A corollary of the Invariance Principle is that, although many different sources can be used

to make sense of any one target (ANGER IS HEAT, ANGER IS A DANGEROUS ANIMAL

and so on) the image schema structure of the target domain is not, conventionally, violated.

The conceptual metaphor ACTIONS ARE TRANSFERS lies behind expressions such as

'he gave the boy a kick', and 'he gave me the information'. This corollary explains that,

although you can give someone a kick, that person doesn't have it afterwards, and although

you can give someone information, that doesn't mean you lose it yourself.

Lakoff's research has led him to believe that we reason about most human events (target

domain) in terms of space (source domain). We use our basic, bodily understanding of

places, movement, forces, places, paths, objects and containers as sources for information

about life, love and all other abstract concepts. For Lakoff, metaphor

'resides for the most part in this huge, highly structured, fixed system, a system anything but

''dead''. Because it is conventional, it is used constantly and automatically, with neither

effort or awareness. Novel metaphor uses this system and builds on it, but only rarely

occurs independently of it.' (1993 p227-8) (my italics)

The idea that a metaphor is like a solar eclipse is constrained by our experience of

metaphors. Metaphors do not cause crowds to congregate in Cornwall, as did the last full

eclipse. Novel metaphor may build upon the system of conventional metaphor, but it does

not usually add a roof and chimney pots. Extending the metaphor beyond the constraints of

the 'invariance principle' makes us aware that we have been using a metaphor to structure

our thinking. Rather than acting as if our construction of reality is the 'truth' we become

aware that it is has been built upon unconscious symbolism. This realisation leads us into

the realm of the imagination and poetry. There we can play with ideas by making inferences

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from the source domain that do not accord with our conventional understanding of how the

world works. (Lakoff & Turner 1989).

Case material

Lakoff's theory suggests that the selection of a particular source for a metaphor is rule

governed. A metaphor is a good match when it has the same causal structure, temporal

structure, event shape and purpose as the source. Which suggests that a client-generated

metaphor, if carefully unpacked, is likely to give a great deal of information as to how the

patient, unconsciously, views the world. (Kopp 1995)

The following narrative episode was taken from an early session of a focal dynamic therapy.

The patient is a socially avoidant man in his forties. This is his third attempt at therapy. His

failure to engage with his two previous therapies was thought at assessment to be due to an

inability to tolerate the silences, in which he cannot bear not knowing what the therapist

thinks of him and dare not ask. In sessions he finds it hard to recall personal material, his

narrative is dismissive and avoidant. He does not use imaginative metaphors to describe his

experiences.

Patient When my Dad died I completely lost interest in my mum and that threw me. It

was fine for a while, but gradually everything went downhill. I didn't want to

see her.

Therapist What do you think she thought of that?

Patient I don't really care

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The first sentence is important in that it describes one of the patient's main concerns,

describing as it does his propensity to avoid social contact. There are conventional

metaphors that structure this sentence. The patient says 'that threw me'. We appreciate that

this experience bothered the patient, he could not understand it, he was unable to explain it

to himself. Yet he chooses to use the phrase 'that threw me'. He is using idiom which is

derived from the conceptual metaphor SELF CONTROL IS BEING IN ONE'S NORMAL

LOCATION (Lakoff & Johnson 1999). Normally our feet are on the ground and we are in

control of our own bodies. In order to describe his experience the patient is offering an

image of himself as an object being passively thrown through the air.

He also says 'I lost interest in my mother'. The attribute 'interest' can be viewed as an object

(ATTRIBUTES ARE OBJECTS). When we have an interest we locate it in a container. In

concrete terms, it is analogous to one country having an interest, such as a factory, in

another country. The interest this man has in his mother is an object that he has lost.

This leaves us with an image of someone who has placed something inside a container.

This object has now been lost. This experience of loss is personified via the conceptual

metaphor EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. The patient is being thrown by someone. The root of

the word reject is ~jacere, throw.

There are many different ways that this patient could have expressed his distress. The

particular idiom he chose relies on conceptual metaphors that express his unconscious view

of the world. He is someone who has lost something that should have been contained and

he has been thrown, rejected. This man, as a five week old baby was left with a neighbour

living in the same street. He has since been told that this was initially a temporary

arrangement so his mother could go out to work. His mother never returned for him. He was

15
brought up by the neighbour who he called 'Grandma'. He knew his mother and siblings and

occasionally visited them. He has never been able to ask his mother why she had left him

with this woman.

The patient denies any link between his early life experience and his current difficulties, yet

the conceptual metaphors that structure his conscious explanations express his

predicament as surely as any slip of the tongue.

The unconscious

The system of conventional metaphor, described by Lakoff and others, is being suggested

by cognitive linguists to be the locus of unconscious thought. This is not a new idea in

psychoanalysis. Lacan, following after the synchronic linguist Saussure, said, elliptically,

'the unconscious is structured as a language'. (Lacan 1979) And yet, conventionally,

language is seen as a product of the conscious mind. We are left struggling with the

paradox that language both allows us to communicate our innermost thoughts and feelings,

and yet is somehow inadequate to express our deepest emotions. Language gives us the

ability to lie, which means that we can hide our secret feelings not only from others but also

from ourselves.

'Man's greatest invention - language - has helped to articulate his experience and to

communicate it. And by augmenting our awareness of experience the experiential world is

'authenticized'. But words may also be used as substitutes so that they prevent, obscure

and edit experience. (Cox &Theilgaard 1997 p188).

'Birth into language and the utilization of the symbol produces a disjunction between the

lived experience and the sign which replaces it. This disjunction will become greater over

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the years……..Always seeking to 'rationalize' to 'repress' the lived experience, reflection will

eventually become profoundly divergent from that lived experience' (Lemaire 1977 p53)

'The individual is not his or her own centre; each of us is inhabited by society through the

use of language. The domination by language is inevitable. Only the psychotic escapes.'

(Turkle 1992 p248-9)

The idea that language cuts us off from experience is one that has taken hold, and yet, as

psychotherapists we offer a primarily verbal remedy for this disorder. Stern ( 1985 p176-7)

states that 'the paradox that language can evoke experience that transcends words is

perhaps the highest tribute to the power of language. But those are words in poetic use.

The words in our daily lives more often do the opposite and either fracture amodal global

experience or send it underground.'

'Amodal experience' is a concept derived from research in developmental psychology.

'Infants … appear to have an innate general capacity, which can be called amodal

perception, to take information received in one sensory modality and somehow translate it

into another sensory modality…the information is probably not experienced as belonging to

any one particular sensory mode. More likely it transcends mode and channel and exists in

some unknown supra-modal form…Infants take sensations, perceptions, actions,

cognitions, internal states of motivations and states of consciousness and experience them

directly in terms of intensities, shapes, temporal patterns, vitality affects, categorical affects

and hedonic tones.' (Stern 1985 p51ff)

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This list is reminiscent of Lakoff's list of structures that must correspond in metaphor. Stern

says that 'These abstract representations may then permit intermodal correspondence to be

made between similar activation contours expressed in diverse behavioural

manifestations……..such a correspondence may be the basis for a metaphor.' Which

suggests that metaphor, the transference of information from one domain in order to

structure an emerging other, is a part of very early development.

Research in developmental linguistics suggests that, unlike other tropes such as irony, the

understanding of metaphor does not require a theory of mind. Winner & Gardner's (1993)

research has shown that metaphors can be understood as early as two or three years of

age, as long as the metaphor involves domains of which the child has knowledge. The

ability to infer other's beliefs is not required. The understanding of metaphor is only

constrained by the limitations of the child's understanding of the source domain (Gibbs

1993). This research, in both developmental psychology and cognitive linguistics supports

the psychoanalytic view that metaphor is a developmentally early process that lies at the

heart of language and meaning. Meaning which 'goes underground' and becomes

unconscious as novel metaphors become absorbed over time into common culture as

conventional idiom.

….the royal road…..

In the poem by David Hart, Wings (Hart 1998) the source domain 'crashed aeroplane' is

used to structure our experience of the falling butterflies. Though the choice of source

domain here is hardly conventional, the metaphor works because it follows the same rules,

requiring the mind to seek out correspondences in terms of temporal structure, event shape

and so on. Cox and Theilgaard (1997 p37), working with imaginative metaphor, believe that

'the metaphor can be as challenging as the patient is prepared to let it be. It cannot force its

18
way into the depths. On the contrary it engages the patient ''before it stirs the surface''. It

engages the unconscious in a search for correspondences, which include emotional

correspondences, before we are fully aware that our mood has been subtly changed.

The conventional conceptual metaphors which I have been describing so far are the ground

from which imaginative metaphor springs. For a novel metaphor to be produced, an

underlying image schema has to be accessed, (often, but not always unconsciously), and

some hitherto unused part of the metaphor called into play. For the schizophrenic this may

be due to a disturbance in the cognitive processes which ought to discard the parts of the

source which do not fit the schema of the target domain (in accordance with the corollary to

the Invariance Principle). The chronic schizophrenic, quoted by Cox and Theilgaard (1997)

above says

''I'm blind because I see too much, so I study by a dark lamp''.

He is using the conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING. In conventional language we

might say

He was blind to the implications

I couldn't quite see what he was getting at

I've been left in the dark.

This patient is struggling to explain his thought disorder. In the terms of contemporary

metaphor theory, he is using the conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING to sanction

the use of language from the source domain, SEEING. But his choice of imagery doesn't

remain limited to the aspects of the source domain which are consistent with the target

domain. He violates the target domain by bringing in an object associated with seeing, but

19
not with thinking, a lamp. This brings about a novel aspect to the problem he is trying to

describe. Together with the use of the term 'study' this offers an image of effortful learning,

in someone confused (blinded) by too much knowledge (light). Which is how he came to

make this statement in the first place. His unconscious mind supplied him with an image

from the source domain, a lamp, which is not conventionally associated with the target

domain, knowledge. This deeply moving sentence can be analysed to show how its

unconscious conceptual metaphors illuminate the patient's internal struggle.

Psychosis

The Lacanian lament that 'only the psychotic escapes' (Turkle 1992) cannot remain

unchallenged. I would suggest that anyone who uses language creatively, be they poet or

scientist, patient or therapist, can enter this unconscious system of conventional image

schemas and play with the symbols they find there. It is only the psychotic who, when they

enter this domain, finds themself trapped, unable to get out. Playing with metaphor is

playing with the building blocks of experience, messing about with the very way we imagine

the world works. Kopp (1995) observed that 'persons with severe Borderline Personality

disorders can sometimes become extremely anxious as they explore and transform

metaphoric imagery.'

As Cox and Theilgaard ( 1997 p110) put it

'There are dangers in working dynamically within the metaphor. A patient expresses

this lucidly; ''I get carried away on metaphors. The metaphor then begins to take

control. Then you become obsessed with the image. The metaphors and images

become the things themselves'' .'

Metaphor is seductive, and not only to the psychotic. Therapists are not immune from the

tendency for the map to become the territory. Miller Mair (1977) considered

20
'all our struggles to understand man as attempts to elaborate different root metaphors as to

what man can or should be taken as being.' He warned that 'The usual pattern has been for

those favouring a particular view to elaborate their position and defend it from attack from

any other quarter, each trying to insist on or find ways of proving how right his view is. What

seems almost never realised is that man is a maker and user of metaphors and is not to be

explained by any particular metaphor.'

Conclusions

Although I believe that Contemporary Metaphor Theory has fundamental implications for

psychotherapy, I do not believe that it necessarily implies any change to what we do.

Psychotherapists already know that imaginative metaphor is central to their work and build

upon the system of conventional metaphor. Rather, it changes the context in which we

work. Szasz (1988) contended that, because so much of psychotherapy is based in rhetoric,

that meant it was fundamentally a 'myth'. Kopp's (1995) 'Metaphor Therapy maintains that

all theories of psychotherapy are themselves metaphoric structures of reality.'

Contemporary Metaphor Theory offers a body of research which suggests that rhetorical

tropes and idiomatic language are, in fact, clues to the image-schemas, the symbols, that

unconsciously order our conscious verbal productions. The terminology of cognitive

linguistics may be different to that which we are used to as psychotherapists but there are

clear analogies between the conceptual metaphors that Lakoff describes and the

unconscious symbolism of theoretical psychotherapy. The idea that most knowledge is

derived by transfer-ence has resonances with our clinical work. The methods used by

linguistics to demonstrate this assumption offer an important perspective on a common

area of interest.

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Lakoff's theory is a key element in the emerging discipline of 'cognitive linguistics' which

has links with developmental psychology and the wider field of cognitive neuroscience. In

standing up for the importance of the non-literal, the science of psychodynamics may no

longer find that it is 'concerned with a type of communication different in nature and logic

from that of the natural sciences'. (Holmes 1985) But not because psychotherapy has

abandoned its traditional grounds, but because the science of linguistics has, in returning to

semantics, offered a new way of looking at meaning, both intra- and interpersonally.

Jeremy Holmes, in 1985, expressed the hope that, one day, 'a broader view of the mind and

imagination can point to fundamental psychological mechanisms: an approach that

embraces both poetry and psychoanalysis may reveal fundamental ways of thinking that

any general psychology would also need to take into account.' It is my opinion that the

developing research base of cognitive linguistics offers a useful perspective on the

symbolism underlying conscious verbal thought. This rapprochement between science and

psychoanalysis is like an eclipse. As the pale moon threatens to eat up the life-giving sun,

so metaphor theory's apparently unpoetic reduction is a rare opportunity to view the

numinous more clearly.

Dr. Terri Eynon MRCPsych

Specialist Registrar in Psychotherapy

Nottingham Psychotherapy Department

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