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The linguistic concept ‘metaphor’ has an established place in clinical as well as theoretical psychotherapy. It has been seen as 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.
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.