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Speech, as was emphasized by Rudolph Loewenstein, is the irreplaceable vehicle of psychoanalysis. The patient's consciously intended messages are less important, however, than the unconscious communications which are conveyed to the analyst via metaphorical expression. The analyst is more interested in the patient's figurative language than in the literal content of what is being related.
Metaphor can be understood as a fundamental aspect of the way in which human thought integrates experience and organizes reality. In most contributions to the subject, psychoanalysts have tended to emphasize the foreground or 'detachable' aspect of metaphor in free association. Metaphor can equally well be viewed as an essential background characteristic of language, reflecting the basic, persistent unconscious fantasy life of human beings.
The displacement of meaning involved in the use of metaphor renders it useful as a means of warding off anxiety. The ambiguity inherent in speech allows the patient to maintain a safe distance from disturbing content by communicating to the analyst metaphorically. A measure of the analyst's empathic ability to understand the patient is the ability to be influenced by the form, sequence, context, and patterning of the material, so that the analyst can receive the hidden message contained in the patient's associations. Psychoanalysis is essentially a metaphorical enterprise: the patient perceives and experiences the world metaphorically, under the influence of unconscious neurotic conflict, and addresses the analyst in a metaphorical way, while the analyst listens and understands in a corresponding fashion.
Many examples can be adduced, such as that of a patient in conflict over homosexual transference wishes connected with fantasies of acquiring great wealth by robbing or superseding powerful authority figures. This patient misperceived a