Metaphoric Function as a Form of Play and Learning, in Human Development and Psychoanalysis

While recognizing that metaphor has been the subject of many psychoanalytic investigations, in this article I aim to approach metaphor from a number of different perspectives. These include Aristotle’s understanding of metaphor from On Poetics, a consideration of Peter Fonagy et al.’s concept of marking as a developmentally early, prelinguistic form of metaphor and learning, and Paul Ricoeur’s extensive consideration of the history of thinking about metaphor. My essay traces the treatment of metaphor from Aristotle’s conceptualization as a “transposition of nouns” all the way to conceptualizing metaphor as a mental process, not necessarily involving language or nouns; a consideration of the embodied nature of metaphor, coming partly from neuroscientific research supporting this idea, including the consideration of metaphor as a form of play and learning, from the point of view of balancing habitual, automatized experiences with novel, surprising experiences; and from the point of view of learning something new from this balance. I argue further that the developmental understanding of metaphor and learning, starting early in development with embodied forms of symbolic representation and progressing to more cognized, linguistic forms of symbolic representation as cognition comes on board, allows for a developmental line of symbolic representation throughout the life course. This can be considered, from a psychoanalytic point of view, as a useful developmental trajectory, providing support for different forms of therapeutic intervention, based on the developmental level of symbolic representation at hand.