You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The mysteries of metaphor have for centuries tempted but eluded the many scholars since Aristotle who have pursued this most important of tropes. Undaunted, Professor Rogers, a member of the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts (SUNY Buffalo) and the Buffalo Group for Applied Psychoanalysis, invokes psychoanalytic concepts to construct a model of the cognitive processes involved in a reader's response to metaphor in poetry.
In effect he asks why metaphor is such a high octane fuel for the reader's cognitive system, and he answers by postulating that poetic language affects the reader on two different levels (“modes of mentation”) which correspond to Freud's notions of primary process and secondary process:
Under certain contextual conditions language mobilizes primary and secondary-process mentation in the reader in such a way that endopsychic tension develops, a passage being felt as vital or powerful or imaginative in proportion to the amount of tension generated between drive and defense structures … (p. 28)
As Rogers sees it, metaphoric language has an enormous capacity to activate unconscious primary-process associations in the reader. The poet “makes extraordinary use of the primary process and … the principal vehicle of the mode is metaphor” (p. 19). More generally metaphor is considered the main expression of primary-process mentation in both prose and poetry.
Metaphoric language has a special ability to affect the reader because the comparison implicit in every metaphor is figurative (non-literal) rather than literal. Thus metaphors are open to more than one interpretation. The phrase “Iron Gates of Life” might be read as an abstract reference to life's difficulties, but in the context of Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” it is far more likely to be taken as a condensation of “the vaginal gates of mother and mistress: the place begotten with the place to beget”. Metaphors such as this that appeal simultaneously to the primary-process and secondary-proce