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Gloria Zeligman is an experienced psychoanalyst, treating both adults, children, and adolescents. She has worked for many years in Stockholm with various psychological conditions and has extensive experience from her many years in child and adolescent psychiatry. Throughout her career, she has been interested in figurative language and the roles metaphors and metonymy play in psychoanalytic theory and practice. This is exactly what her book, Psychoanalysis in the Light of Metaphor and Metonymy, is about. In her dissertation, Zeligman examines how the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT), developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, can deepen the understanding of Sigmund Freud’s theory of primary process thinking and his interpretive work within psychoanalysis.
At a time when psychoanalysis is increasingly called upon to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues, Zeligman offers a bold synthesis of classical Freudian ideas and modern cognitive linguistics. Drawing particularly on metaphor theory, Zeligman provides a fresh and intellectually rigorous re-reading of Freudian concepts such as, e.g., primary process thinking, displacement, and condensation. Her interdisciplinary approach contributes not only to psychoanalytic theory but also to the fields of pedagogy, cognitive science, and hermeneutics.
At the heart of Zeligman’s argument is the proposition that metaphor and metonymy are not merely rhetorical devices but central operations of the unconscious. She revisits key Freudian concepts such as the primary process, condensation, displacement, dream formation, and symptom construction, and places them in dialogue with the structural and cognitive roles that metaphor and metonymy play in shaping human thought and affective life.
Zeligman demonstrates that metaphor and metonymy are not just stylistic features of language but fundamental mechanisms of our thoughts and psychic structuring. Her close analysis of Freud’s case study of ‘Little Hans’ is particularly illuminating, sh