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MEARES'S REVIEW OF MY WORK on action language is based on misreading. A brief response should suffice to indicate the problems.
Meares's review rests in large part on allegations concerning my positions on metaphor, reality, and the conduct of therapy. He presents me as so devoted to logic over phenomenology as to be consistently negative in my attitude toward metaphor. According to comments he makes in different places, I reject metaphor altogether, I find the metaphor of the inner world therapeutically harmful, I disparage metaphor because there is no "it" that metaphor refers to, metaphor is not real, and it cannot be validated.
What is the actual case? I developed a critique of metapsychology as the theoretical language for psychoanalysis. (Here, by the way, and contrary to Meares's wrong account of it, is where I drew on Binswanger, Sartre, and Wittgenstein). Going further, I proposed an alternative language in which to couch the theoretical propositions of psychoanalysis, and I named it action language. I emphasized how often Freud and others fell back on blatant metaphor to get over the logical rough spots of metapsychology. Consequently,