Metaphor, Affect, and Arousal: How Interpretations Might Work

Mr. D., a middle-aged, narcissistically disturbed social scientist, had a dream of a composer and a lyricist. The metaphorical transference interpretation was that the patient had appreciated the extent to which his analyst had been able to acknowledge his feelings-like a lyricist puts words to the music of a composer. Especially useful had been his analyst's ability in the previous session to identify the patient's intense loneliness. The naming of this feeling, which even the patient had failed to recognize, gave him a powerful sense that he was capable of understanding himself and of being understood by someone else, and more specifically by his analyst. He was not “psychotic,” as he had accused his analyst of thinking of him and as he had secretly felt about himself.

It is my purpose here to explore one of the key issues of technique and theory—namely, the mechanisms of psychoanalytic interpretation. It is my impression that metaphorical language plays a crucial role. If we can be explicit about our interpretive actions and words, we will learn more about what makes interpretations work. This might suggest something to us about our models of the mind, at least as systems for encoding (remembering) and (affectively) organizing experience.

To Freud (1914), “the theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole of psycho-analysis rests” (p. 16). The various models of classical psychoanalytic theory can be viewed as systems for the organization of memories, which function as enduring psychic structure. Psychoanalysis is the process which undoes