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The mirror has become a metaphor we use quite easily, but define quite disparately: from Lacan's “mirror stage,” to Kohut's “mirror transferences,” to Alice's experiences of a mirror that manages to clarify important aspects of reality precisely by virtue of its distortions and distensions. Metaphor provides us with room to play with an idea in our minds, which lends itself to distortion but also provides a productive means for navigating through the dark and tangled terrain of nonverbal processes. It gives us an anchor, a way of not getting lost: not only within ourselves, but also with the other. Within the protective safety of the play (Gadamer, 1988; Winnicott, 1971), we can share the metaphor, build it, deconstruct it, rebuild it, try it on for size. Perhaps most importantly, we can share it—and re-share it. Like a vivid dream, it becomes a reference point we can come back to. It marks the place.
Once we enter the realm of metaphor, we are in slippery territory and easily lose sight of any path that has been defined in linear terms. It is, however, by virtue of metaphor that we are able to jump from equivalence to equivalence, as we map out new paths determined by that other set of laws governed by the unconscious. In this land of metaphor we can often find our groundings in the rich conceptualizations that are so important to us, in part, because of the very reasons that make them so elusive.