You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this paper, I hope to show how an appreciation of metaphor can enliven our therapeutic enterprise. I am seeking to locate a conception of metaphor and, more generally, of poetics, that has useful application for the analytic clinician.
First, we will begin with general comments about the wider arena of rhetoric and word use. Second, we will move on to a theory of metaphor that may give you a sense of why I believe it holds such vigor for the analytic therapist. Third, we will consider certain empirical findings that may help us to better understand this vigor. Finally, we will briefly itemize and describe some overlapping categories of metaphor. Throughout, we will interpolate clinical examples.
If we wish, we can climb inside our patients' words as if their words were three-dimensional spaces. We can then “explore” each space as rich in history and personal meaning. Or, borrowing a different metaphor, we can find each word to be a kind of aperture. We can peer into some aspect of the patient's world of inner meaning In the following brief example, I treat a patient's word as a three-dimensional space:
“Rigidity, you say. Take me inside ‘rigidity.’ What's there?” I ask.
“Old clocks,” said my patient. “I love old clocks.” He continues spontaneously for much of the rest of the session with all the mechanical devices that had mattered in his life—and from that to his brother and competitiveness. The very particular extended meaning to this patient of “rigidity” was thereby explored beneficially.
Does this constitute a “poetics of psychoanalysis”? As Adrienne Rich (1993, pp. 84-87) writes: