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No one today needs to be told that metaphor is inextricable from psychoanalysis-that it makes significant appearances in the therapeutic dialogue and in psychoanalytic writing, as well as in some important psychic processes. Analysts have been writing explicitly about metaphor since at least 1930 (M. Levin), and Ella Freeman Sharpe's 1940 paper on the subject is still well-known. Though it is not clear how explicitly Freud himself saw the connection, Lacan (1957) stressed that the two modes of unconscious mental functioning that Freud (1900) called “displacement” and “condensation” correspond in fact to metonymy and metaphor. I myself have tried to show that Freud's theory of character takes for granted the existence of an unconscious metaphorizing process in the psyche, and Spence (1987) has suggested that certain parts of psychoanalytic theory are largely metaphorical in nature. Other authors (F. M. Levin, 1980; Modell, 1997) have pointed to a relation between metaphor and affect, while still others (Fast, 1992; Smith, 1992) have speculated about how very early infantile experiences provide the psychic grounding for metaphor.
Psychoanalytic interest in metaphor has moreover, been increasing, quasigeometrically. A search of the online Jourlit/Bookrev database (, consulted July 28, 1998) turns up fifty-eight entries for the keyword “metaphor”-only six of them from the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s combined, but twenty-six of them from the 1990s alone. For all the current interest in the subject, however, only a minority of psychoanalytic writers on