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As the author declares in her preface she has from childhood held poetry, and the literary imagination, very dear. Now in this book she brings this sensibility to bear on her years of clinical practice in San Francisco, and bravely attempts to explore and elucidate the multifarious roles of figurative expression within the analytic context. In particular she seeks to alert us to the therapeutic charge that may lie implicit yet unrecognized in the casual metaphor, which, if allowed to enrich and articulate itself, might unlock the patient's capacity for growth and creativity.
The cornerstone of her argument is that metaphor often, perhaps always, represents ‘the outcropping of unconscious fantasy’. There is, if you like, an implicit ‘coniunctio’ within metaphor, a combining of the inner and outer worlds, of the abstract and the concrete. Moreover, this effort to relate the known and sensed to the unknown and intuited typically arises from, and generates, strong feeling in a way that links intellect with emotion, embodies insight, engages the symbolic capacity.
Siegelman's own, rather overwrought metaphor for the structure of her book is of a suspension bridge - the central span of the clinical material supported by two