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There's a cool web of language winds us in …R. GRAVESI, too, am untranslatable;I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs ofthe world … —W. WHITMAN
To explain, literally to lay out in a place where particulars can be readily seen … Thus to expound or put out at the cost of ignoring the reality or richness of what is so put out. Thus to take a view away from its prime reality or royalty, or to gain knowledge and lose the kingdom. G. SPENCER BROWN, The Laws of Form
The usual psychoanalytic approach to metaphor has been to see in it a reflexion of unconscious fantasy and to use its imagery as another path towards the understanding of this (e.g. E. F. Sharpe, 1950); (Arlow, 1969). Arlow, for example, writes:
Metaphor constitutes an outcropping into conscious expression of a fragment of an unconscious fantasy … The fact that the analysis of metaphorical expressions may lead associatively to repressed fantasy material comes as no surprise to the analyst, versed as he is in dream interpretation (p. 7).
I have no doubt that this content-orientated approach is valid within limits, and every analyst can surely think of examples where it applies.1 It emphasizes, however, what is common to dream and metaphor (or any other psychic product) and underplays what is different between them. Used in this way, all roads lead to Vienna, and the whole of culture can begin to appear as illusory superstructure, with less 'reality' than root unconscious fantasies. This is the danger of reductionism.
My aim in this essay will be to reverse this movement. My project will be not unlike that of Gregory Bateson (1967), who writes: