The Surface and the Depths: The Metaphor of Depth in Psychoanalysis and the Ways in Which it can Mislead

WE ARE SOMETIMES taken prisoner by our metaphors. Their powerful imagery can become so compelling that we forget that they are metaphors and mistake the properties of our metaphorical images for those of the phenomena we are using those images to address. Such, I think, has been the case with the metaphor of depth that has been so central a feature of psychoanalytic discourse. The sheer familiarity of the depth metaphor makes it difficult to recognize the ways in which it has shaped our thinking and obscured or foreclosed other potential ways of understanding the phenomena with which we are confronted in our daily practice. As a consequence, our formulations about personality development, psychopathology, and therapeutic change have been constrained and at times misdirected.

My complaint, it should be clear, is by no means with the use of metaphor per se. As this article itself amply illustrates, my own writing is drenched in metaphor (still another metaphor, of course). Indeed, it is difficult to imagine how psychological inquiry can be pursued in any meaningful manner without extensive use of metaphor. To attempt to do so would lead either to a stultifying impoverishment of thought or to self-deceptions in which metaphor simply goes unnoticed (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).

Even in the occasional sentence that seems quite devoid of metaphorical imagery, the trace of metaphor can usually be seen if we probe sufficiently, because the very construction of our language depends on metaphor. The etymology of our most abstract words usually reveals that they are metaphorical extensions of more concrete experiences and the words used to describe them. Our ordinary prose, said T. E. Hulme, “is the museum where the dead metaphors of the poets are preserved” (quoted in Rubenstein, 1997). Or, as Empson (1930) put it, in a classic work of literary theory, “metaphor, more or less far-fetched, more or less complicated,