Kirmayer - Healing and The Invention of Metaphor

LAURENCE J.
KIRMAYER
H E A L I N G A N D T H E I N V E N T I O N OF M E T A P H O R :
T H E E F F E C T I V E N E S S OF S Y M B O L S R E V I S I T E D 1
ABSTRACT. In this essay, I argue that a theory of meaning adequate to account for the
effectiveness of symbolic healing and psychotherapy requires some variant of the three
concepts of myth, metaphor and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative
structures of the self produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands
not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily-given in meaning. Metaphor
occupies an intermediate realm, linking narrative and bodily-given experience through
imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective
quality space. This pluralistic perspective itself constitutes a middle-ground between
constructivist and realist approaches to meaning that can integrate causal and interpretive
models of symbolic healing.
"I am manipulating," says the Alchemist. "No, you are

dreaming," says Novalis. "I am dreaming," says
Novalis. "No, you are manipulating." The reason for
such a profound duality is that fire is within us and
outside us, invisible and dazzling, spirit and smoke.
- Gaston Bachelard (1964: 55)
INTRODUCTION
There are by now many attempts in the psychiatric and anthropological literature
to argue that all forms of symbolic healing are based on common mechanisms:
that traditional healing rituals, insofar as they are effective, share essential
features with Western psychotherapies (e.g., Dow 1986; Frank 1973; Kakar
1991; Kleinman 1988b; Prince 1980). Yet, psychotherapy involves forms of
conversation and exchange that clearly differ from the poetic incantations or
performative magic found in ethnographic accounts of healing. Psychotherapy
focuses on explicit description of the psyche - that is, the self and its internal
processes and external relationships all more or less hypostatized as mental
entities (Kirmayer 1989). While counterintuitive technical models may lie
behind psychotherapists' interventions, much of the language of psychotherapy
is simply the repetition of banal truths of folk psychology. Far from the crises of
symbolic death and rebirth depicted in ethnography, the talking cures of
psychotherapy consist of thousands of small turns that repair, restore and mend
the damaged, locate new possibilities or carry the sufferer forward into a new
situation. Though there is plenty of smoke, where in all this talk is the transmut-
ing fire?
This essay is a contribution to a theory of meaning adequate to encompass the
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatty 17: 161-195, 1993.

9 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
162 LAURENCE J. KIRMAYER
range of constructions and discoveries made in psychotherapy and related forms

of symbolic healing. Psychotherapists sometimes claim a privileged position
from which to understand the relationship between the meaning of symbols and
their therapeutic effficacy: the recognition of the power of emotion and the
pervasive irrationality of human experience that comes as a revelation to some is
a commonplace in psychodynamic theory. Psychotherapists are sensitized to the
emotion-laden qualities of even the most ordinary conversations. It is tempting
then to find the meaning of any utterance in the speaker's efforts to simul-
taneously reveal and conceal, express and manage, his or her "true" feelings.
This leads to a form of psychological reductionism which is an occupational
hazard of the psychotherapist. Such reductionism is countered by the perspective
of anthropology - namely, that systems of meaning, and specific meanings, have
social origins and functions along with their significance for the individual. As
Kleinman (1988: 48) has put it: "the meanings of chronic illness are created by
the sick person and his or her circle to make over a wild, disorderly natural
occurrence into a more or less domesticated, mythologized, ritually controlled,
[and] therefore cultural experience." The perspective of psychology then must
be complemented by a more explicitly social view of the origins and effects of
symbolic meaning.
At the start, we are hampered by the concreteness of our language. Meaning is
not a thing or substance; it is a term for the active relationship of receiver to
message (MacKay, 1969) or - since we are not only receivers of meaning but
equally its creators - of self to world. What is meaningful is what can be taken
in hand and worked with in thought, feeling, imagination and social transaction.
If meaning is relational, then it is not to be discovered by reducing feelings,
sensations or actions to isolated, abstract constituents but by precisely the
opposite direction of analysis: showing what situated feelings, sensations and
actions an abstract communication or conceptualization evokes. Meaning, on
this view, is equivalent to use - whether that use involves an overt action or an
inferred cognitive transformation - and use is irreducibly triadic: the use of
something by someonefor some end.
Another name for the act of discovering, constructing or conferring meaning
is "interpretation." Steiner (1989: 7-8) notes that the dictionary offers three
main senses to the term "interpretation" that reveal the major facets of meaning.
An interpreter is, at once, a decipherer and communicator of meanings, a
translator between languages, cultures and conventions, and a performer who
presents meaning through enactment. Clearly, these three senses of interpreta-
tion always co-exist. Meaning is discovered, constructed and transmitted
through interpretation. As enactment or performance, any interpretation commits
us to a specific version of reality that carries implicit values. To lay bare the
values that lie behind our interpretations, and the theories and practices that
authorize them, we must understand the dynamics of interpretation.
HEALING AND METAPHOR 163
In this essay I offer some notions about how language, gesture and action do
the work of meaning and use this to explore the efficacy of symbolic healing.
My examples are drawn from psychotherapy as well as from anthropological
accounts of rituals and the use of symbols which appear to have healing effects
(whether or not they are explicitly recognized as healing practices by par-
ticipants). In juxtaposing traditional healing, symbolic transactions and
psychotherapy, I do not mean to imply that all forms of symbolic healing are
equivalent. The drawing together of different forms of symbolic healing can
illuminate not only commonalities but the mechanisms of specificity and
difference.
While, as Jerome Frank (1973) has argued, all successful forms of healing
may improve "morale" and so promote a universal human capacity for adapta-
tion, this generality is just a statement of outcome and does not go far in
explaining either the cultural fit of specific therapies or their potential efficacy
(Young 1988). Nor is raised morale the only important outcome of healing. The
healer aims not simply to convince people that they are better but to help them
to understand, accept or transcend their predicaments - to show that afflictions
make sense, even if they are terrible; to show how illness can be mastered,
controlled, or transformed; or, when neither understanding nor control can be
achieved, to demonstrate to the survivors that there is a way to continue with
life, in this world or the next.
Trying to refine his general account of nonspecific therapeutic effects, Frank
has come to recognize the central importance of rhetoric in healing (Frank &
Frank, 1991). Rhetoric is concerned with what moves people - with the use of
language to transform meanings or conceptual positions along with perceptions,
emotions and moral convictions (Spillane 1987). Although some accounts of
rhetoric emphasize the force of logical argument, most recent attention has
focused on pragmatics and poetics (Perelman 1982). The pragmatics of rhetoric
includes the situated nature of discourse which mobilizes institutional authority,
social power, drama and charisma. The poetics of rhetoric concerns the evoca-
tive power of language and, since Aristotle, poetics has been centered on the
study of metaphor.
In this essay, I will try to show how therapeutic rhetoric uses metaphor to first
evoke and then bridge the compelling narratives of cultural myths and the
bodily-felt immediacy of experience. As Fried_rich (1986, p. 17) puts it, speaking
of discourse more generally: "it is the relatively poetic nature of language,
formed and articulated through figures cf speech, that most deeply and mas-
sively affects the imagination - to the ext, znt of seeming to be, paradoxically, not
only its dress but its incarnation. The f,gures o f language are constrained and
structured by culture, whereas culture c ."ten moves, analogously, in the shape of
figures." While this approach is most immediately applicable to psychotherapy
and other "talking cures" with their explicit use of tropes, it also fits nonverbal
symbolic therapies provided only that we understand metaphor in its more

general sense of metaphoric concept rather than its strict sense as a linguistic
trope.
An emphasis on rhetorical meaning breaks down the distinction between
specific and nonspecific, content and process in psychotherapy. Rhetoric is
always specific in that it aims to move a particular audience in a given direction
and does this through language, symbols and performance specific to the
audience, aim and context. The nature of the rhetorical process - and the
corresponding mechanisms of symbolic healing - then, are tied to the specific
content of discourse and action. It is not just any meaning that heals, nor simply
any meaning that fits, but those meanings that offer the sufferer and his com-
panions a way to continue.
INTERPRETING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SYMBOLS
Three theories of interpretation dominate contemporary accounts of symbolic

healing: psychodynamic, structuralist and post-structural deconstructionism.
Each theory encompasses a wide range of approaches grouped together by
intellectual lineage or family resemblance (cf. Hawkes 1977).
Psychodynamic interpretations are centered on the idea of motive; they tend
to treat every meaningful event as existing for or against some human agency. In
classical psychoanalysis, this agency (the "ego") is primarily occupied with a
struggle between sexual desire and worldly constraint (Freud 1930/1962). In
more recent psychodynamic theories, the emphasis on sexuality is diminished
and the insistence on struggle muted in favor of adaptation or, still more, the
acquisition of a stable self-representation and capacity for self-soothing (Eagle
1987). Always, these truths are hidden from the sufferer's consciousness, buried
in the depths. The patient's speech and action are not to be taken at face value -
they are rhetoric, rationalization and, at the same time, symptoms. Interpreted as
symptoms, the patient's discourse and behavior point to underlying dynamics
whose nature is already known, in general outline, through psychoanalytic
theory (Gellner 1985). The analyst, through his or her training, self-knowledge
and tenacity, can guide the patient on a descent to the repressed, showing the
patient signs of hidden psychic truth and, in sterner times, confronting the
patient with the evidence of self-deception. The healing efficacy of
psychoanalytic interpretation resides in revealing the warded-off truth - whether
that truth is conceived of as historical reality o r narrative invention (Spence
1982). 2
Symbols may also heal because they constitute a dynamic compromise,
without insight, that allows the individual to arrange a covert truce between
warring factions of the self that is accepted and ratified by others. Kakar (1991)
describes such processes in Indian healing cults and Obeyesekere's (1981; 1991)
studies of religious practitioners in Sri Lanka provide detailed examples of this
sort of symbolic "work of culture." In the classical psychoanalytic hierarchy of
values, however, such symbolization - no matter how widely accepted and
valued in a social group - is believed to yield only a temporary relief of
symptoms and is clearly inferior to the pure gold of insight which offers both
truth and cure.
Of the many themes that can be discovered in any stretch of symbolic action,
psychoanalytic interpretation gives weight to those that confirm pre-existing
theoretical ideas about what really matters: conflicts over sex, aggression and
mortality (Jones 1967). This position is based on the conviction that there is an
authoritative interpretation of symptoms and symbols that is simply waiting to
be discovered by the astute observer. However, if every interpretation of distress
is, at root, the invention of metaphors for experience, healing may occur not
because a conflict is accurately represented, or even symbolically resolved, but
because the metaphorization of distress gives the person room to maneuver,
imaginative possibilities, behavioral options, and rhetorical supplies.
For Freud, both the truth and the efficacy of psychodynamic explanation
rested on what Gellner (1985) has called his "biohermeneutics" in which the
body of desire, known less through its transparent hungers than through its
symptoms, lapses and distortions in awareness, was correlated with the biologi-
cal body, known through neurophysiological theory (Sulloway 1979). Later
versions of psychodynamic explanation have employed different theories of
bodily desire and adaptation drawing from neurology or ethology (e.g. Bowlby
1988; Eagle 1987) or have tried to abandon biological theory entirely and so
pass over into structuralist or deconstructionist accounts of the psyche as an
artifact of language or textuality (Bersani 1986).
However its truth is certified, the depths of psychoanalytic understanding are
found in the heroic ego's struggle with what it fears to acknowledge. What is in
the depths is what is most powerful and true. But, as Steiner (1989) argues, what
is on the surface, accessible to consciousness, has equal power in our lives. And
what is not conscious is not necessarily unconscious, held out of awareness by
active processes. There is much that is implicit and unknown because it forms
the warp and woof of thought rather than its underground.3
Structuralism attends to this warp and woof by exploring the meaning that
emerges from the mutual coordination of systems of signs and symbols.
Structuralist accounts aim to show that the internal logic or combinatorics of a
system of symbols form a "language" that yields meaning above and beyond
that given by the world of reference. As with the grammatical analysis of
language, structuralism provides a comprehensive order of myth and symbol but
the question remains whether this order has a functional reality for the people
studied or is an artifact of the scholar's esthetic impulse. In some hands,
structuralism involves a search for symmetry or the formal order of groups - a

cognitive crystallography.4 While the psychological reality of this order is not
the primary concern of structuralist analysis, some authors invoke principles of
cognitive efficiency or social-historical forces to support the reality of specific
structures. For example, variations in myth and ritual practice may be arranged
along intersecting geographical axes reflecting historical diffusion and differen-
tiation between neighboring groups (e.g., Lrvi-Strauss 1988).
Structuralism has enjoyed its most enthusiastic application in the study of
myth. The meaning revealed by structuralist analysis, however, resides not in the
idiosyncratic detail of a myth but its position within the set of all possible related
myths. 5 Meaning then inheres in the relationships in a total system of possible
transformations of myth; and the meaning of an individual myth - what it hides
and inverts, what it loses through entropic degradation - can only be discerned
by reconstructing that larger, more complete set of permutations and combina-
tions of elements from which the individual instance of myth is constructed.
This notion that the meaning of a myth resides in its relationship to all of its
potential transformations applies to symbolic productions quite generally.
Speaking of the symbolism of ritual masks, Lrvi-Strauss continues, "like the
words of a language, each one does not contain within itself its entire meaning.
The latter is the result of two things: the sense included in the particular term
chosen, and the senses (which have been excluded by this very choice) of all the
other terms that could be substituted for it" (1988, p. 56). 6 It is interesting to
note here that L6vi-Strauss acknowledges a sort of meaning intrinsic to words or
symbolic elements having to do with their sense. His choice of s e n s e a s a
metaphor for meaning is surely not accidental; it points to meaning as a function
of the sensory or sensual qualities of experience. Yet, in the very next paragraph,
IAvi-Strauss enjoins the reader to "assume as a working hypothesis, that the
color, and the features that struck me as characteristics of the...masks have no
intrinsic meaning, or that this meaning is incomplete when considered by itself"
(p. 56). This de-emphasis of intrinsic sensual meaning allows Lrvi-Strauss to
discover regularities in the composition of masks in neighboring native com-
munities and to identify the sum of all local traditions as a complete set of
transformations of the symbolic code of masks which appears in degenerate or
incomplete form in any one locale.
The structuralist emphasis on the coordination of whole systems of symbols
suggests how the mere invocation of myth or symbol can work to restore the
sense of social order both within the group and v i s - a - v i s significant others. Yet,
structuralist accounts pay less attention to how myths, symbolic objects and
rituals are used by participants in everyday life and to how symbols work within
the individual imagination to reshape thought and feeling.7 The structuralist
search for order sidesteps the problem of understanding how symbols enter into
and change the sufferer's world.
In the absence of a theory of how symbols work on the body and in the
imagination, structuralist and related semiotic accounts tend to assume that
participants share the authors' esthetic values. For example, Herzfeld (1986)
describes a Cretan ritual for curing symptoms caused by the evil eye which
involves counting the "twelve holes of the body" once in a specified order (two
ears, two eyes, two nostrils, mouth, two breasts, navel, genitals, anus) and once
in reverse. Herzfeld suggests that the effectiveness of the ritual lies in the ability
of the systematic order to create a sense of closure or completion thus, protect-
ing the body from further intrusion. "In a successful cure, the end of the
incantation is also the end of discomfort" (p. 107). Herzfeld gives no indication
of the efficacy of this ritual but the formulaic and conventional structure of the
incantation might be expected to yield only a superficial reassurance that
everything is in its place (much like the common ritual to "knock on wood" to
avoid a reversal of fortune or the more elaborate imprecations that pepper
Yiddish conversation (Matisoff 1979)). Abstract formulations should not
obscure the underlying texture of bodily-felt experience in ritual or symptom
experience. The incantation is a systematic polling of the body orifices that, at
the experiential level, may not involve such satisfying closure. In many parts of
the world, symptoms ignore the boundaries of incantations whose efficacy is
judged on vague and often shifting grounds.
Of course, structuralist accounts do make use of information about the
physical properties, psychological associations and social context of symbolic
materials. This should alert us to the fact that naturalism - in the sense of a
biological psychology that grounds symbolic cognition in the body and in the
exigencies of local power, relationships and ecology - is necessary for a fertile
structuralism even if it remains an unacknowledged source of structures that are
misleadingly attributed to formal logic and combinatorics.
Indeed, where structuralist accounts are most successful they are least
structural - adhering less to the formal order of symbols than to their evocative
meaning in terms of everyday culture and praxis (Devisch 1985, 1990). Even
L6vi-Strauss's famous analysis of the effectiveness of symbols in the Kuna
shaman's ritual for difficult childbirth is most credible where it is least con-
cerned with formal structure.
A difficult childbirth results when Muu [the power responsible for the formation of the
fetus] has exceeded her functions and captured the purba, or "soul" of the mother-to-be.
Thus the song expresses a quest; the quest for the lost purba, which will be restored after
many vicissitudes, such as the overcoming of obstacles, a victory over wild beasts, and,
finally, a great contest waged by the shaman and his tutelary spirits against Muu and her
daughters, with the help of magical hats whose weight the latter are not able to bear.
Muu, once she has been defeated, allows the purba of the ailing woman to be discovered
and freed. The delivery takes place and the song ends with a statement of the precautions
taken so that Muu will not escape and pursue her visitors. The fight is not waged against
Muu herself, who is indispensable to procreation, but only against her abuses of power.
Once these have been corrected, the relationship becomes friendly, and Muu's parting
words to the shaman almost correspond to an invitation: "'Friend nele [seer], when do you
think to visit me again" (LEvi-Strauss 1967: 182).
LEvi-Strauss's understanding of the effectiveness of this ritual hinges on "the

discovery...for which Holmer and Wassen deserve...full credit - that Mu-Igala,
that is "Muu's way," and the abode of Muu are not, to the native mind, simply a
mythical itinerary and dwelling-place. They represent, literally, the vagina and
uterus of the pregnant woman, which are explored by the shaman and nuchu and
in whose depths they wage their victorious combat" (p. 183). This metaphoric
linkage allows LEvi-Strauss to argue that the shaman is working directly on the
woman's body through his narrative.
Everything occurs as though the shaman were trying to induce the sick woman - whose
contact with reality is no doubt impaired and whose sensitivity is exacerbated - to relive
the initial situation through pain, in a very precise and intense way, and to become
psychologically aware of its smallest details...The technique of the narrative then aims at
recreating a real experience in which the myth merely shifts the protagonists. The nelegan
enter the natural orifice, and we can imagine that after all this psychological preparation
the sick woman actually feels them entering. Not only does she feel them, but they "light
up" the route they are preparing to follow - for their own sake, no doubt, and to find the
way, but also to make the center of inexpressible and painful sensations "clear" for her
and accessible to her consciousness. "The nelegan put good sight into the sick woman,
the nelegan light good eyes in the (sick) woman..."
The elaborate narrative creates a metaphoric landscape that represents the

sufferer's physical and existential plight in detail. The metaphor of the "nelegan
lighting good eyes in the woman' constellates a clear focus on the pain and
discomfort that can be transformed by the extended metaphor of the shaman's
journey. Insofar as this account is plausible, however, it is not structural: the
efficacy of the ritual lies not simply in the setting up of the analogy between the
woman's body and the mythical realm but in some metaphorical movement with
psychophysiological effects. While structural relationships are implicit in the
metaphor and contribute to its logic of analogy, they do not provide an explana-
tion of its evocative or healing power.
Unfortunately for Ldvi-Strauss's account, subsequent ethnography makes it
clear that the Kuna woman does not understand much of the shaman's arcane
language (Sherzer 1983). In Sherzer's opinion, "the psychological efficacy of
the ikarkana [the healer's incantation] depends on individuals' knowledge of
and belief in the general features of the process rather than on a comprehension
of its minute referential and symbolic details. Furthermore, the repetitive,
incantatory, and euphonic nature of these ikarkana renders them mentally
relaxing. Performed by a specialist in whom the patient has the utmost con-
fidence and combined with the administration of actual medicine, the ikarkana
usually prove to be quite effective" (p. 134).
So even here, where his concern is so clearly on the effectiveness of imagery
to evoke physiological change, L~vi-Strauss has minimized the problem of the
material chain of influence to elucidate a formal correspondence. Whatever

metaphoric work is done by the suffering woman is not to be found in the formal
structure of the shaman's incantation but in expectations engendered by the
larger social context of healing and in idiosyncratic bodily-feelings and images
evoked by nonverbal and paralinguistic aspects of the ritual process.
Despite its ethnographic deficiencies, Ltvi-Strauss's account of Kuna
shamanism remains exemplary because it fits expectations, derived from
psychotherapy, for meaningful communication between healer and sufferer. It
seems, however, that the meanings adduced by structuralism are often either
extrinsic and unavailable to the meaning-in-use of the people under study or
else, far from representing the underlying motive structure of experience,
constitute a kind of "overthought" - a formal order that satisfies the esthetic
desire for symmetry and closure. 8 Where this esthetic order is deeply felt, it may
indeed be healing but we are rightly suspicious of semiotic analyses that
emphasize coherence in extended systems of symbols and signs to the exclusion
of the contradictions, tensions, inconsistencies and fragmentation of ordinary
discourse. This gap between the potential meaning discovered by formal
analysis and the effective meaning that moves people to change is a general
problem of symbolic anthropology that remains insufficiently examined
(McCreery 1979).
Dow (1986) has offered a universal scheme for symbolic healing that builds
on Ltvi-Strauss's classic account. For Dow, all symbolic healing involves four
components that commonly occur as successive stages in the therapeutic ritual:
"(1) A generalized cultural mythic world is established by universalizing the
experiences of healers, initiates, or prophets, or by otherwise generalizing
emotional experiences. (2) A healer persuades the patient that it is possible to
define the patient's relationship to a particularized part of the mythic world, and
makes the definition. (3) The healer attaches the patient's emotions to transac-
-tional symbols in this particularized mythic world. (4) The healer manipulates
the transactional symbols to assist the transaction of emotion" (p. 66, emphasis
added). This is a structural model insofar as healing is attributed to the mapping
of the sufferer's local world and idiosyncratic experience onto the formal order
of a cultural mythic world. Each of the italicized verbs, however, points to a
process that is unexplored in a purely structuralist account. It is not enough to
notice the homologies between bodily, social and symbolic worlds. We want to
understand the process of transduction at the level of physiological, psychologi-
cal or social mechanisms. Ultimately, what is left out of structural accounts are
those nonsemiotic social (and biological) processes - i.e., establishing, persuad-
ing, attaching, manipulating, transacting - that provide both the medium and
the causal structure of healing and semiosis (Deely 1990). 9
If structuralism constructs and values an exhaustive mathematical order, its
rebellious son, deconstructionism, celebrates disorder. Deconstructionism shares
with structuralism the impulse to sever words from their connections to the
world and treat language as a glass bead game. However, deconstruction claims
this not just as an analytic technique or temporary bracketing, but as a truth
about the ungroundedness of all discourse. Where prior generations read
literature (and each other's lives) for moral education, deconstructionists now
view the sincerity of authors and lives as a rhetorical ploy. The author's voice -
the resonance of her body situated in a specific place and time - is trumped by
proclamations of the indeterminacy of all meaning. Of course, in this effort to
avoid the totalitarian domination of any authorized truth, deconstruction
inevitably produces its own totalitarian destruction of truth.
Deconstructionism works by lowering the criteria for encyclopedic amplifica-
tion (Eco 1990). It employs a manic discursiveness to amplify meaning by
clanging, puns, tangential associations, or an aerial view of the ground. I~
Deconstructionists value polysemic richness, indeterminacy and self-conscious-
ness over clarity, commitment and participation. What they gain in playful
detachment, they lose in salience, seriousness and conviction. Yet, play and
commitment are not necessary opposites, only opposed under the construction of
deconstruction, which steadfastly denies or betrays its own prior commitments
and real-world convictions 11 _ something that play need not do.
We can describe the limits of each of these systems of interpretation in terms
of its style of reduction. Structuralism and deconstructionism reduce meaning
upward to disembodied abstraction. Psychoanalysis reduces meaning downward
to a few bodily themes. 12 In each case, the reduction amounts to an unwilling-
ness to acknowledge the ties between symbols and some aspect of the world. In
our efforts to protect human reason and imagination from vulgar materialism,
we create theories of disembodied, asocial meaning. Of course, we can only
minimize the bond between symbol and reality by willful denial since, without
the constant smuggling of worldly knowledge and experience into our abstract
systems of interpretation, they quickly grind to a halt (Johnson-Laird, et al.
1984). 13
The perspective on metaphor to be developed here acknowledges the power
of the intermediate realm of symbol (and, hence, as a corollary, the power of
language idolized by deconstructionists) while keeping the reality of body and
society always in view. At the same time, it retains what is most credible about
structuralism - the image of man as a bricoleur, thinking with things, to
construct an order based on the logic of the concrete. Metaphor theory does this
by insisting on three levels to action and discourse: the mythic level of coherent
narratives; the archetypal level of bodily-givens, and the metaphoric level of
temporary constructions. Metaphor theory is presented here as the play of tropes
in the intermediate realm between body and society - always in contact with,
constrained by, responding to, coordinating and provoking, the upper andlower
realms of myth (the socially constructed) and archetype (the bodily-given). 14
MYTH, METAPHOR AND ARCHETYPE
Let me pick up now where I left off in an earlier essay (Kirmayer 1992a) - with
Italo Calvino's The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1977). This metafiction
provides an apt metaphor for the semiotics of narrative and metaphoric inven-
tion. The story begins in a forest where men are robbed of their power of speech.
From this silence, the narrator enters a castle where, around the dinner table, a
host of characters tell their tales by dealing out cards from a Tarot deck. The
sequence of images presented on the cards guides (or is woven into) the
narratives. Each story is supple, improvised, apparently unconstrained. Yet,
when all the cards are laid on the table they are found to form a magic square:
the stories interlock so that, starting from any edge, one can traverse the cards in
a narrative sequence that crosses other narratives. This same artifice is applied
twice in the book: once with the Sforza-Bembo Tarot and idiosyncratic tales
and, again, with the Marseille Tarot and the great narrative themes of Western
literature.
The Castle invokes three realms of meaning: myth, metaphor and archetype.
By myth, I mean not false or foolish beliefs that are widely held, but those
narratives that are embraced by a culture and by which a society structures and
legitimates itself. Taking place outside ordinary space and time, the great myths
are atemporal. They turn sequential stories into instantaneous templates,
enlarging and ennobling the narrative structures of the person and other socially
significant agents - animals, gods, the elements. Myths thus become the
occasion for belief in something larger than ourselves (Kolakowski 1990).
Archetype, a word in some disrepute, I take to mean the bodily-given -
whether rooted in the nervous system or emergent in the form and exigencies of
social life. Archetype stands for subjectively compelling images/experiences
that seem to be presented to us before reflection or invention or which we
experience on discovery as already familiar. At some level of abstraction, the
notion of archetypes is quite plausible. For example, finger pressure applied to
closed eyes creates visual phosphenes - striking patterns of rays or checker-
boards that reflect the orderly arrangement of neurons in the retina and visual
system. Attempts to ground thought in basic physical actions also imply an
archetypal basis to thought in the structure of the motor system and bodily
constraints (Johnson 1987). Perhaps, the propensity for narrative invention itself
reflects "archetypal" patterning (Bruner 1990). Whether more complicated
experiences will prove to have a bodily ~ounding is unknown but not im-
plausible. For example, the temporal structure and mutual interaction of certain
basic motivational systems for attachment, exploration and aggession could
provide a template for familiar narratives of heroism or tragedy. This is not to
argue that the archetypes need arise from the body autonomously - i.e., without
any contribution from a culturally patterned environment. Such an event is
impossible - all human experience and behavior is a result of interaction

between organism and environment, just as all physical development is an
interaction between the genome and the developing organism. The notion of
archetype then depends only on acknowledging that in its interaction with
culture the body is primed to pick out of common social experiences (i.e., being
born, having a mother, father, siblings, facing death) certain recurrent patterns
that then constitute a universal substrate of human experience and imagination.
If archetypes reflect potentialities in the nervous system they must nevertheless
be enabled by specific social experiences. Recurrent or universal patterns in
perception may also reflect existential universals - inescapable features of our
social being - rather than any neurological anlangen. What feels bodily-given or
immediate is also, in variable measure, culturally conditioned and contingent. 15
By metaphor, I mean not only the linguistic device but the broader notion of
metaphoric concept: thinking of one thing in terms of another (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980). As such, metaphor is the basic process of creative thought or
invention. 16 While metaphor, like analogy, preserves structural and/or qualita-
tive invariants (Haskell 1989), it is not simply an isomorphic mapping of one
concept onto a schematic alternative. Metaphor goes beyond analogy to
transform its topic by an interaction with the sensory, affective and cognitive
aspects of juxtaposed concepts. Metaphor is not simply a mapping of similarities
from one domain to another; it creates similarities by demanding that we
construct a category or a world in which connections between topic and vehicle
can be found (Glucksberg and Keysar 1990). From this point of view, analogy is
one aspect of the metaphoric process but metaphors, involving sensory, affective
and imagery-based reshapings of concepts and experience convey surplus
meanings or connotations that are muted in explicit analogies. Metaphors need
not be expressed in words, they can arise from the juxtaposition of images or
take the form of gestures - for example, by using one thing as though it is
another (Gardner and Winner 1979).
Borrowing terminology from the study of literary tropes, in the metaphor 'A
is B', A is the topic which is to be understood on analogy with some quality or
structure of the vehicle, B. Metaphor is a way of highlighting or amplifying low
salience features of a subject or topic by thinking of it in relation to a vehicle
(Ortony 1979). Metaphor works by mapping the topic onto the high salience
features of the vehicle, finding additional salient features and then translating
back to the topic domain. What is salient is, of course, relative to both topic and
vehicle, so metaphor always involves a process of exploration (however brief or
superficial) of temporary constructions, to find analogies that fit. Topic and
vehicle must interact to determine which features of each are salient in the
metaphoric relation (Sternberg and Nigro 1983). The mapping of topic onto
vehicle must involve many small leaps in which features of the topic are
translated into the vehicle, moved through the representational space of the
vehicle and then translated back to check them for coherence within the
structure of the topic. This cycle of forward and back-translation is necessary
because otherwise a metaphoric extension might quickly become misleading or
even uninterpretable by using extraneous properties of the vehicle to represent
the vehicle. To be meaningful, the analogic transformations within metaphor
must be widely context dependent at both ends of the metaphoric process. Topic
and vehicle are then best understood not as isolated lexical terms but as
conceptual models or structures that function as operators to asymmetrically
modify each other. Metaphors relate structures not their elements. Metaphor
theory thus captures an essential insight of structuralism without maintaining its
excessive demand for symmetry.
I will use myth and archetype as a pair of correlated but distinct concepts that
constitute a sort of oblique rotation of the axes of body and society. Myths take
shape and authority from social processes. Archetypal images take shape and
authority from their correspondence to human potentialities that emerge from
the interaction of body and society. Although both might therefore be reduced to
some interaction of body and society, myth and archetype are more natural
categories for the analysis of symbolism precisely because they conflate the
biological and experiential meanings of body and society. In so doing, they
collapse the misleading dualism of objective and subjective knowledge. While
the scientific enterprise is to explain the subjective experience of the body and
society in terms of the objective disciplines of biology and sociology, in fact,
our "objective" theories are built on metaphors borrowed from experience, so
this reduction hides an essential circularity.
In the universe of Calvino's story, the archetypal level corresponds to the
Tarot cards themselves as basic images with reference both to the world and to
the historical system of image-language. The metaphoric level corresponds to
the imaginative space in which author and reader extend these images. The
mythic level pertains to the arrangement of narratives through time and space as
in their mutual coordination in a magic square.
The cards are the conventional symbolic materials or resources of language.
They are not abstract, logical "atoms" but whole pictures, with an indefinitely
large range of correspondences to objects and events in the real world. They are
extended metonymically/metaphorically to create narratives: features of each
card are selected and elaborated by using "encyclopedic" knowledge about
similar objects or concepts in the world.
Like any image, each card is inherently polysemic. Its potential meanings are
constrained by its position in the narrative. Thus, the cards only appear to be
isolated building blocks - when the tale is told they are revealed as units within
the larger whole that has structured their placing. This larger whole is the
overarching structure of meaning. The myths themselves must fit together.
While this is an arbitrary formal constraint imposed by Calvino, it corresponds
to a level of coherence also found in the world beyond the C a s t l e - wherever

humans construct and inherit a social order.
Calvino's narrative method is not simply a formal combinatorics of words, it
has two grounds which are both sources of invention and constraints: the images
on the cards and the symmetry of the magic square. The narrative structure
moves forward by metaphoric extension or implication. But this motive force
springs from the "minute particulars" of each image that evoke sensation,
feeling and action in imagination. The images thus provide a determinate but
polysemous infrastructure to the narrative; this is the level of archetype.
Similarly, to fit the ~and scheme, the author must always have in mind where
the next card fits in the narrative, or he must improvise new meanings on the
elements in the card to allow it to play several roles depending on the path taken
through the field of images. This teleological structuring principle is myth.
What is gained by invoking myth, metaphor and archetype as three distinct
sources or levels of meaning? Wouldn't it be enough to describe the world in
terms of alternate sets of metaphors chosen for their inner coherence? After all,
given the right frame, our image of the world can be made to resemble almost
anything - at least this is the claim of radical constructivism. On this view, each
choice of metaphor constructs a new world and metaphoric worlds are generally
incommensurable (Rorty 1989). There can be' no hope then of reconciling bodily
and symbolic orders except by subsuming both under the contingency of texts,
discourses or ways of life. Such thoroughgoing constructivism is a thin reed that
collapses in self-referential negation (Laudan 1990). Even where radical
constructivism can be sustained by intellectual tight-rope walking, it runs the
risk of trivializing ethical and esthetic feelings and commitments by viewing
them as arbitrary, self-serving or merely 'relative'.
This disheartening relativity is inevitable in any epistemology based entirely
on metaphor. Metaphor alone has little regard for truth. Truth emerges only in
the transaction between bodily, metaphoric-imaginative and social processes. It
is a central task of medical anthropology to show precisely how body, imagina-
tion and society occupy the same world.
How then do we judge some metaphors beautiful, good or true - that is, apt?
Fresh or stale, wild or staid, metaphor must be used, must enter the social world,
to acquire its value. This makes the truth value of metaphors subject to our
efforts to apprehend and describe the physical and social world in which we are
imbedded.
While metaphors may structure and lend coherence to whole domains of
thought (Gibbs 1992), in practice we are free to pick discordant metaphors to try
to get at some "underlying experience" and, in fact, this is usually what we do.
For example, Naomi Quinn (1991) has studied the many different metaphors
used by people to describe their marriage. Mixed metaphors that sit uneasily
with each other are the rule. Their coherence stems not from any consistent
extended metaphoric concept but from a more specific experiential fact that is
being repeatedly described from many angles. Similarly, personal auto-
biographies may employ divergent metaphors in the service of some overarching
narrative that attains coherence not from a single root metaphor but from a
distinctive sequence, trajectory or transformation that is only secondarily and
incompletely metaphorized in self-depictions (Bruner, 1990). So too, social
histories may require a full palette of primary metaphors to blend and capture
the distinctive color of a time.
Thus, it appears that metaphors are derivative of something deeper and more
fundamental. What is the structure of this underlying experience that admits
such infinite and contradictory metaphoric expression? This "real presence" that
lies behind our metaphoric constructions includes our experience of embodiment
- as Johnson and Lakoff have emphasized (Johnson 1987; Lakoff & Johnson
1980) - but it is also the social body, the presence of others, and the palpable
bonds and forces we feel with them. Social relationships and patterns of
interaction, like our experiences with the body and the physical world, can be
endlessly mined for new metaphors.
In psychotherapy, as elsewhere, metaphors get linked together to form more
or less coherent narratives. Despite the endless variety of metaphors used to
describe a given situation, and the opportunity for contradiction and qualifica-
tion, we can describe the order of discourse in terms of overarching metaphors.
Thus, in healing rituals, the underlying myth can be described as an extended
metaphor, and the ritual itself as a dramatized figure of speech (Beardsley 1967).
The study of myth is then the study of a new order of organization, "the
narratization of metaphor" - the imposition of hierarchical structure on thought
and action. This ordering of experience, which is pre-eminently social, is the
domain of myth.
There are, of course, limits to the extended metaphor of the Castle. Assigning
myth to the rigid order of the cards makes it appear that structural analyses -
that relate myths to each other syntagmatically - are complete in themselves.
However, mythic narratives are richer and more complex than the geometric
arrangement of the cards would suggest. The world of myth is less a crystal
pavilion than a Sargasso Sea of tangled strands, abortive stories, fractured tales,
false-starts, bifurcations, and re-entries. 17 We do well to remember that the
narrative structure of myth derives from the content of life history, psychologi-
cal development and social action, and that the power of myth resides in its
ability first to evoke and, only then, to order these moving experiences.
The perspectives of myth, metaphor and archetype capture respectively,
social, psychological and bodily contributions to truth and meaning. In showing
the value of each source of meaning, I am arguing for a pluralistic view of the
therapeutic enterprise. But in psychotherapy, the action is in the middle realm.
HEALING INVENTIONS
Metaphor occupies an intermediate realm - tentative, partial, exploratory,

inventive in its origins, content, commitment and implications. How then can
these intermediate constructions do the work of healing to become "metaphors
we live by"? In the examples below, I will illustrate three ways: (a) by implicitly
structuring conceptual domains through the qualitative logic of metaphoric
implication; (b) by evoking strong sensory/affective associations that dominate
or transform more abstract and rigid constructions; (c) by successfully bridging
the archetypal and mythic levels of experience. Characteristically, these
examples involve not the grand sweep o f healing transformation but the small
turns o f thought and feeling which metaphor engenders. Even dramatic changes
may, on closer examination, be found to be composed of these small turns. 18
Here are three examples of the explicit use of metaphor offered by a
psychotherapist:t 9
"A 54 year old woman, mother of five grown children, now divorced and living alone,
was extremely depressed. She likened her experience to a totally black room without a
door to get out. Using the total darkness, we agreed that there might be a way out that she
could not yet see, but that she had to slowly feel her way around the room at all levels to
see what was there. We used this metaphor over a period of weeks and she eventually
found a way out as she made parallel changes in her behavior, seeking and finding job-
training that changed the direction of her life."
"A 29 year old married woman, with no children, was anxious and lacking in self-
confidence. She imagined herself falling into a huge pit and couldn't see the bottom. She
clung to roots and vines, desperately fearing the fall. This continued over several months
as she gradually felt herself getting closer to the bottom and less fearful. In fact, when she
finally, touched bottom, it was a relief and her confidence increased tremendously. She
began to confront others in her life with angry feelings she had never revealed and found
that her feelings were respected. She made some real changes. Unfortunately, (or
fortunately) she ended up leaving her husband in the process. The metaphor served to
present an image that Could be focused on to reduce her fear of the unknown. The
increasing clarity of the image paralleled her decreasing fearfulness."
"A 33 year old female, married with two children, was afraid that talking about her
feelings would be like sinking into a whirlpool from which she could not escape. She was
unable to use the image to find a solution and I suggested that therapy was like a rope
thrown to her so that, while she experienced the whirlpool, she did not have to go under.
This greatly reduced her fear of the unknown feelings and she has made excellent
progress in taking risks in experiencing painful affects."
These vignettes illustrate the therapist's willingness to begin with the patient's
own metaphor. This is part emPathy and part strategic "joining." Each metaphor
has natural extensions that open up new images of self and other and new
possibilities for behavior. These inventions are credible because the way in
which they are "logically" derived by metaphoric implication from the root
metaphor also transforms affect and perception. When no transformation from
within is forthcoming, the therapist introduces something new: the rope - a
metaphor for the therapeutic relationship but not only that, also a rope to pull
one out of the maelstrom, and an implicit message that there is someone holding
the other end. The metaphor/image that describes the problem contains or admits
its own possibilities for resolution. 2~
In one of the few empirical studies of the use of metaphor in psychotherapy,
McMullen (1989) re-analyzed tapes of six cases from the Vanderbilt
Psychotherapy Project (Strupp and Hadley 1979) to count instances of
metaphor. 21 She found little evidence that novel figures were more effective
than frozen figures or cliches in healing. Successful psychotherapy cases were
characterized by repeate d well-formed central figures that expressed the client's
essential theme or problem, bursts of repeatedly using and elaborating this
metaphor, and evidence o f some change in this metaphor over time. In contrast,
unsuccessful cases used many different metaphors without a clear central self-
depiction, did not elaborate the metaphors, that is, each usage tended to be
isolated and remained undeveloped, and did not change their metaphors over
time. Therapists in unsuccessful cases appeared to h a v e difficulty empathizing
with the client as evidenced by negative extensions of the metaphor or an
unwillingness to adopt the client's own metaphor. For example, a client who
referred to himself as "some kind of nut," "a monster," "the trophy of the
rhinoceros you put on your mantle," was responded to by the therapist in terms
of the figure of "trying to shock people." There were no differences in vividness,
uniqueness or novelty in successful versus unsuccessful cases (as judged by
experimenter-raters). Indeed, "very few novel figures were found." Without pre-
therapy measures or controls, it is impossible to determine whether McMullen's
results reflect pre-existing characteristics of successful clients or the nature of
effective therapy. 22 Moreover, as McMullen notes, the therapists she studied
were all psychodynamically oriented and may be less inclined than therapists of
other schools to offer metaphors of their own to clients.
Nevertheless, the examples above and McMullen's study suggest that the
mutative symbols of psychotherapy need not be wildly inventive, only apt. A
conventional metaphor or cliche may be apt when bodily-felt conviction or
social concern brings it alive. Brought to life, even cliches can be mined for new
meaning.
A middle-aged man comes to therapy stating he has no feelings, has never had a friend
and trusts no one. After several tentative meetings he describes a reverie one day in
which he had an image of himself as a series of concentric rings or shells. Asked what is
at the center he adds: "In the center is a black stone because I'm a black-hearted bastard."
Asked whether others can get in or he can get out of these shells, he says, "There is a
door but you have to have the key." Asked whether it is possible for him to open the door
from the inside and let someone in, he replies "I don't know," and adds, "You have to
have just the right key to get even a little way inside but once someone does they never
leave." He then speaks movingly of the only significant love relationship of his life - a
woman he has not seen in many years.
The image of concentric rings or spheres is the form of the mandala, which Jung
(1969) took to be a basic symbol of the wholeness and plenitude of the self. It is
reminiscent of a medieval orrery where God's perfection is found in spherical
symmetry and man's election in the central location of the earth (cf. Hallyn
1990). It conjoins the archetypal experiences of the geometric order of the visual
system - revealed in phosphenes and children's drawings, with the motivational
pattern of approach/avoidance or relatedness and detachment. The archetypal
roots of this conjunction are alluded to in one of Bachelard's reveries on space:
"images of full roundness help us to collect ourselves, permit us to confer an
initial constitution on ourselves, and to confirm our being intimately, inside. For
when it is experienced from the inside, devoid of all exterior features, being
cannot be otherwise than round" (Bachelard 1969a: 234). Adding multiple shells
within the sphere emphasizes the barriers and distance from periphery to center.
It is used here to picture the self as inward, away from the social world, and to
describe an experience of emptiness and isolation from fellow-feeling.
The therapist finds the patient's metaphor immediately intelligible in sensory
and emotional terms and works within it - this is the essence of empathy, the
place from which the psychotherapeutic conversation begins (Hobson 1985). At
the same time, the tacit understanding and acceptance of metaphor creates the
intimacy of sharing a private language (Cohen 1979).
Asked what is at the center of the circles, he replies "a black stone" then,
collapsing the symbol into a conventional metaphor of self-derision, he adds:
"because I'm a black-hearted bastard." The conventional expression plays off
the qualities of stone synesthetically to assert the sufferer's self-image as dark,
negative, hard, cold and unfeeling. At the same time, behind these negative
associations, the original image evokes other qualities, not yet acknowledged -
the strength, density, and immutability of stone.
The metaphor of concentric spheres also invokes the narrative possibilities of
myth: a heroic quest to find the golden key; a descent to hell, where, at the
center one finds the absolutely irredeemable or the adamantine truth that can
withstand the worst ftres. The choice of narrative is triply constrained by the
details of the metaphor, by the patient's bodily experience and by the social
world he inhabits outside the consulting room.
The therapist's question about whether the shells can be opened from the
inside introduces the notion of agency - there are decisions to be made at each
level whether to divulge one's self to others. This moves the patient to remark:
"once you get inside you never leave." The properties of stone extend to the
permanence of relationship once the center has been attained. He is further
moved to recollect his one love affair and to re-experience the sense of being
cherished he felt then.
In this conversation something is being described that is intelligible as a basic
human experience: the inwardness and privacy of the self-observing ego. The
detail of this metaphor holds diagnostic information on the integrity and

constancy of the self along with evidence of the negative self-evaluation at the
core. Its spontaneous production reflects its origins as an unself-conscious self-
representation. The image of the shells is, at the same time, an offering of
relatedness, a move in a relationship. Responded to in a collaborative fashion it
leads to the building of bridges between self and other. Thus, the metaphor
serves, at one and the same time, to create intimacy, to lend archetypal structure
to inchoate experience, and to open up possibilities for dialogue and transforma-
tion.
A young woman in psychotherapy, asked to visualize early childhood experiences to
better understand the origin of her difficulties, sees first a single red brick and then a
brick wall. Asked what is behind the wall she states: "Fear." Encouraged to remove one
row of bricks at the top to get an image of what lies beyond, she catches a glimpse of a
woman in a white dress. This leads her to painful recollections of a previously idealized
mother now recalled as emotionally unavailable.
The brick wall is used here as a clichr, a dead metaphor, for the obstacles to
recollection and awareness. This metaphoric barrier can be interpreted as
reflecting repression, resistance and defense. Or, we can recognize that these
latter terms are no less metaphorical and say that the repression is the brick wall.
Dismantling the wall is lowering the repressive barrier, removing the obstacle to
remembering. Undersfood as action or presentation, the metaphor and the mental
mechanisms are one and the same.
The therapist accepts this block as a real barrier in imaginal space. Conse-
quently, the conversation remains within the realm of metaphor: the patient is
encouraged to take down just one row of bricks - a gradual easing of the barriers
to memory. The wall structures the process of remembering, so working with the
wall modulates that process. Here metaphor allows not only playful intimacy but
reassuring distance from painful emotion. Respect for the solidity of the brick
wall allows the patient the comfort of moving at her own pace. 23
The woman in the white dress may be an episodic memory or an improvised
construction - white is the conventional color of purity and ideals, of what is
drenched in light. Just as she saw past the brick wall, the patient's associations
allow her to see past the fairy-tale white dress to the shadows and sorrow of her
remembered relationship with her mother.
A young man, prone to sudden feelings of deflation and self-loathing, dreams of tiding a
spirited white horse along a fiver bank. Asked about his associations to the horse, he
says: "The only horse I've ever ridden is the 25 cent zoo variety - the tired dusty gray
kind that's tied to a stake and just goes round and round in circles."
The tired horse is a victim of the circus or a country fair. His energy spent, his
back broken by countess children, he cannot run wild along the river bank like
the spirited horse of the speaker's dreams. The conscious state of weakness,
enervation, lack o f potency and virility, the bodily woundedness o f the patient is
compensated and, for a moment, healed in the dream. To sustain this vision, to
transform the consciously identified broken horse into the spirited stallion,
something must be recaptured. Here it is the social world that holds the key. The
therapist - in this case a Jungian analyst - supplies a narrative: the Greek myth
of Bellerophon riding Pegasus to slay the Chimaera (Graves 1960). This turns
the patient toward musing on the lack of heroism in his own life and the
transformation of the hero through facing impossible trials. The effect of
introducing an explicit mythic narrative into therapy then is to point beyond the
metaphor of the broken horse to the journey of the hero (Norman 1990). This
provides direction to the search for fresh metaphors and, through metaphor,
evokes changes in bodily feeling, habitus and interpersonal stance.
While Jungian analysts have a penchant for archaic myths, ancient Greece is
not the only source of mythic narratives - new and recycled myths are con-
stantly being produced by both authorized and marginal groups in society.
Therapists draw potential healing narratives from the myths they have studied or
unconsciously assimilated through psychological theories and interpret patients'
dreams, reveries and actions in conformity with these narratives. Only oc-
casionally are myths explicitly told to patients to valorize their struggle and
prime their own narrative ability. More commonly, myths remain implicit and
are expressed in conventional wisdom about life history, development and tasks.
In any case, the myth provides a coherent and moving story that confirms the
universality of the patient's situation even as it clarifies the elements of the
predicament (in its setting and dramatis persona~) and suggests a way to resolve
the conflict (through its plot).
Of course, all of these clinical vignettes traverse myth, metaphor and
archetype. The value of distinguishing these sources of meaning is to lay bare
the dynamics of meaning construction in the therapeutic encounter. The
problems that remain for study are how and when archetype and myth are
translated (or wrestled) into the middle ground of metaphor, what work is done
there, and what happens when the products of imagination are returned to the
body and the world.
THE PLAYING FIELDS OF MYTH AND METAPHOR
In urban, industrialized, pluralistic societies, it seems we no longer have myths,

only entertainments and illusions.24 Yet, we cannot live without searching for
stories to give coherence to our lives. And to do the work of healing, stories
must be believed in - not in the sense that their truth value is certified by logic
or argument but in the sense that they are taken into the imagination and lived
with, if only for a time.
The recent film Field of Dreams 25 provides apt metaphors for the workings of
myth in contemporary North American society. A man in his mid-thirties with a

wife, daughter and a new farm, hallucinates a compelling voice that whispers in
his cornfield: "If you build it, he will come." He is moved to clear his field and
build a baseball diamond. In due time, long dead baseball players return to life
on his diamond and resume the game they loved. The hero travels around the
country, through time and space, collecting others who share his ability to dream
and they too draw sustenance from the sight of the ghostly players and even
enter the game. Sacrificing his own mundane livelihood to pursue this mad
quest, the hero ultimately redeems his dead father who had forsaken his own
dreams to be a ball player, in bitterness, to take up the burden of supporting a
family. The story ends with father and son playing catch on the diamond. From
the air, w e see a long line of jewel-like beads of light stretching out to the
horizon - a trail of cars bringing other dreamers to the miraculous playing field.
We can distinguish two conceptions of myth - as narrative or ideology and as
transcendent knowledge/experience. As narrative, myth encodes tacit knowledge
of social life. The authority of myth then stems from its fact-like detail and the
ordinariness of its narrative structure (Veyne 1988). In this view of myth, there
is no need for a special mythic consciousness, only a social structure that
reserves a place for transcendental values and experiences that remain unchal-
lenged by critical attitudes and empirical tests.
The second conception of myth emphasizes its occurrence in a liminal space
and time which requires a special human consciousness to apprehend and which
has a peculiar ability to move us, not only because it reflects our concerns but
because it has a sweep or power that comes from our longing for community or
transcendence (Turner 1974).
From this second viewpoint, myth is not sustained by ordinary argument or
conviction. "Reference to myth is not knowledge, but an act of total, entrusting
acceptance with no sense of need for justification. That is why, if such an
acceptance is directed towards a person, it draws that person into a mythic
reality. That which Jaspers calls existential communication is a participation in
myth, the dwelling of persons in its territory" (Kolakowski 1989: 45). This view
would set myth apart from any technology of healing or persuasion. "Myth
cannot be reached by persuasion; persuasion belongs to a different area of
interpersonal communication, that is, to an area in which the criteria of the
technical resilience of judgments have their force" (p. 7). But this is true only in
those contemporary terms in which persuasion is recognized as such - and
hence, becomes a technical activity. Persuasion presumes an awareness of two
people standing apart and influence being applied across that distance. Where
mutual influence is understood to occur through participation - as in the
encounter of sufferer and healer - shared myth is the constant product of
people's most intimate persuasions.
There is a link between these two conceptions of myth that parallels the
relationship between suggestibility and hypnosis. Suggestibility is always

present as a feature of everyday experience but may be facilitated by the
absorption in imagination and dissociation of conscious controls characteristic
of hypnosis. As a state of heightened absorption and imaginative involvement,
hypnotic trance may be valued for its own sake as well as for the specific images
or enactments that may be evoked (Kirmayer 1992b). Similarly, mythic
consciousness has intrinsic value related to exercising our imaginations,
participating in the solidarity of community and valuing something larger than
ourselves. This general value is in addition to the truths of specific myths which
themselves may be apprehended in or out of mythic consciousness. Outside of
mythic consciousness, myths are heard by critical consciousness as errant
history and by imaginative intellect as apt metaphors. In mythic consciousness,
myths are heard as the immanent and awe-full actions of the gods or the
inexorable workings of the cosmos.
Field of Dreams speaks to the lack of common myth in our time and to the
revaluing of dreaming and imaginative play as occupations. In the individualis-
tic ethos of North America, people must invent their own myths and disguise
their enactment as pastimes. The secular mythology of baseball stands in for
religious myths. Even those unmoved by the spectacle respond to the oppor-
tunity, created by the field, to find a place to live their dreams. This field of
dreams is Winnicott's (1971) transitional space where culture is created through
play. In Turner's distinction, it is liminoid not liminal - secular not sacred, free
play rather than fixed ritual, aleatoric rather than tightly scored (Turner 1982). 26
The Field offers North Americans a taste of two things they sorely miss:
mythic consciousness for its own sake - that is, the opportunity to break out of
conventional social roles to dream and play with "antistructure" - and a specific
myth of reconciliation - that is, a narrative that brings together alienated or
fractured parts of an ideal self.
But the authorized myths of a society have a power beyond playful inventions
or entertainment. "Myths are a source of dangerous intoxication whenever they
serve as a defense against anxiety and in that function they demand counterac-
tion. A total taming of the world and a total elimination of otherness may be
only an illusion and is not always free of bad faith. Mythological interpretations
of the world are capable of helping to remove this otherness to the extent that
this is possible, and they are also capable of helping us to understand why this is
not possible in full. Myths which perform these two irremovable and irreplace-
able functions cannot create a sense of satiety. They always contain within
themselves a version of the Myth of the Cave, some variant of the story of
paradise lost, a sense of the inability of a harmonious transition from a condi-
tioned to an unconditioned Being" (Kolakowski 1989: 105). Put another way,
myths must acknowledge the creativity of the inchoate - not as another mythical
place (Hades) but as a real and desperate experience.
We can now see what constitutes the healing efficacy of great myths: their
ability to contain and unite in narrative the most disparate themes and deepest
contradictions in human experience. Archaic myths work today just to the extent
they are interpreted in ways that tap archetypal structures of desire and concern
- like the longing for reconciliation between father and son, dreamer and
pragmatist, fulfilled in Field of Dreams.
While they can be read in the light of larger social ideals, myths also shape
the mundane narratives of everyday life. The social inheritance of cultural norms
is facilitated by - indeed, may only be possible within - the framework of
mythical narratives (Kolakowski 1989: 115). But new metaphors breed new
myths, just as myths authorize the metaphors they contain.
Kolakowski worries whether a consciousness is possible which acknowledges
the social, functional genealogy of myth and at the same time is capable of
actively participating in myth. But this is like asking, is a consciousness possible
which understands the technical and psychological aspects of art or its com-
merce and is at the same time capable of producing and enjoying art?
Kolakowski thinks not because myth requires total participation:
myth belongs to a different order of spiritual life than participation in myth; it belongs to
an area subject essentially to the same criteria as the totality of discursive thought...In its
verbal realizations myth is an expression of collective experience, and participants in this
experience have no obligation to place it in the same order of life in which scientific
values function, or to subject them to the rigors of the same criteria of affirming and
denying judgments...Explained genetically, it [myth] loses its vitality to the extent that
mythical consciousness has already succumbed to confusion with technological
consciousness - a confusion which is admittedly common but neither inescapable nor
permanent, but bound to a certain specific cultural formation where technological
rapacity, and a cult of the sciences dominates spiritual life. If, for example, religious
beliefs are eroded under the influence of religious studies, the cause lies not in the nature
of things or in an essential psychological divergence of both of these areas, nor in their
logical incompatibility, but in civilizationally defined, suicidal claims of myth to
nonmythical legitimacy...Thus, while the clash of myth with knowledge about myths is
real, it is in each instance civilizationally defined: it is a clash within [or between] certain
cultures, rather than within the universal nature of human experience (Kolakowski, 1989:
p. 120).
For Kolakowski this is so because myth occupies a transcendental realm and, if

it would just know its place, need not pay heed to technical facts. He thus argues
that, for the reasons just adduced, myth cannot help but have an aspect that is
turned against the body since a thoroughgoing materialism would be the death of
myth - here is the inescapable tension between imagination and reality that
makes the mind-body problem a perennial concern (Kirmayer 1988).
But this view of myth hides a fundamentalism. For myths, while they are
transcendental, are not static and must reply to every fact that changes the
human condition, science not excepted. So this separation of science and myth,
techne and transcendence, cannot be sustained.
CONCLUSION: THE MORAL LIFE OF METAPHOR
From the perspective of metaphor theory, meaning is at once sensuous, emo-

tional and conceptual. Metaphor theory provides an approach to the problem of
the creativity or inventiveness of thought and to the mutability of feeling in
ritual and healing. But metaphor theory alone cannot account for the aptness and
authority of metaphoric constructions. To address the problem of truth and
value, we must situate metaphor in relation to body and society, archetype and
myth.
For Friedrich (1986) one pole of the poetic imagination is the sound or music
of language while the other is myth. I would generalize this notion for symbolic
healing: one pole of the imagination comprises the embodied, immediate,
sensual qualia of experience (which I have called archetypal), of which language
sound is but one instance; the other pole is myth in the extended sense discussed
above. To continue the felicitous parallel with Ffiedrich's work, if "[t]o create
consubstantiality between language music and myth is the master trope of
poetry" (p. 39), then the master trope of symbolic healing is to create consubstan-
tiality between bodily experience and myth. This is the work of metaphor.
Metaphoric concepts conjoin the abstract and the concrete in experience so
thought and feeling are aspects of the same image, concept or action. Our
complex thoughts and feelings are built on a foundation of simpler metaphors
that involve motivational judgments that are closer to what we mean by the term
emotion. There are feedback loops between levels: as a verbal image evokes
affect, the affect in turn reinforces the image (or causes it to shift to one more
consonant or typical of the affect). While all thought has sensory and affecfive
qualities, clearly, some thoughts are more vivid or hotter than others. The
distinction between hot and cool cognition - that is, the relative sensory-
affective quality of thought - has to do both with the intensity of evocation of
lower levels of meaning (which is a process, in large part extrinsic to the speech
act) and the relative elaboration of higher levels of 'abstract' meaning. Cogni-
tion can be cooled off by the elaboration of abstract meanings that fie thought
into a network of associations less closely linked to lower levels. As the density
of abstract implications exceeds the intensity of affective meaning, the concept
becomes formal and analytic. Alternatively, our metaphors can be cooled off by
social constraints that give restricted rules for the formal application of
metaphor - as in the language games of logic, mathematics and science. But it is
"the poetic potential of language - not logic or basic reference - [that] most
massively determines the imagination" (Friedrich 1986, p. 43).
The complexity of metaphor continues to develop with increasing verbal
sophistication. The self-referential level of representation means we can become
conscious of our own choice of metaphor. Increasing self-awareness allows
distancing, decentering and perspective taking which, as cognitive skills,
correspond to awareness of metaphor as trope (Vosniadou and Ortony 1983;

Winner 1988). But we do not lose the earlier levels of unself-conscious
metaphoric understanding or interpretation through evocation. These develop-
mentally earlier levels of meaning continue to take part in the process of making
meaning of experience, operating in parallel and contributing to (interacting
with) later conceptual and more abstract ways of understanding.
Metaphor theory then can give content and specificity to the notion of
embodied meaning, procedural knowledge, habitus or presentation (Bourdieu
1977; Csordas 1990). Our abstract and conventional metaphors have develop-
mental and conceptual ~ounding in earlier, more fundamental metaphors.
Metaphors are stacked to create a scaffolding of meaning that runs in two
directions to ground our thought and action in early synesthetic and sen-
sorimotor experience on the one hand (Bachelard 1969b; Johnson 1987) and in
social forms of life on the other (Bloor 1983; Bruner 1990; Quinn 1991).27
Metaphor theory then suggests two important ways that meaning is not simply
a matter of mental representations (Kirmayer 1992a). First, meaning or action is
presented to the representational system, not only from outer world but from
lower levels of sensory-affective processing in the central nervous system and
from bodily experience. The metaphoric objects of thought are far from the
static pictures suggested by the term representation - metaphors are tools or,
more abstractly, operators that can act on themselves to create the process of
thought. Second, meaning is presented to others in communication, in the sense
that, for instance, a metaphor is not simply a representation of its originator's
thought, but is also a tool to be taken in hand by the listener and used to fashion
new meaning. Metaphoric invention thus occurs both in the acts of speaking and
of listening.
Metaphoric constructions are not final but tentative; they do not always reflect
an underlying representation or even preverbal body-knowing but are a sallying
forth, a presentation of what is possible and hence, the invention of a potential
truth to which we may commit ourselves to varying degrees. This is because
metaphoric models are essentially local or piecemeal. Not only do different
regions o f experience demand different metaphors but multiple metaphors are
easily generated to capture different facets of the same domain.
Chief among the vices of metaphor is profligacy. Inventive as metaphoric
thinking is, it is easy to go astray with undue emphasis on irrelevant analogies or
unfortunate connotations. Thinking in metaphors allows us to readily create
extensions to our images of reality but the coherence and accuracy of our
metaphors must be checked, not simply by applying other metaphors for
coherence (does the argument have a firm foundation?) - which will result in a
purely rhetorical truth but, inescapably, by empirical observations at each level.
In the case of metaphors for self and other, the empirical truth criteria are
pragmatic and moral - what will life be if lived like that?
The metaphor/image worked with in healing indexes and evokes but cannot
be reduced to emotion or psychic conflict. Any interpretation of a metaphor is
partial and does not exhaust its potential meaning. Metaphor thus has a life of its
own. But exclusive attention to the content of metaphor leads to uncritical
hypostatization. 28 Without critical awareness of the patterns that connect body,
self and society in the generation of metaphor, we may give life and substance to
any metaphor - creating Golems with unknown energies. Having established the
power of metaphor we must confront its limits or else yield to a thorough-going
relativism.
Relativism is, in its contemporary radical versions, a creation of literacy
(Gellner 1988; Ricouer 1991) - made thinkable by the plurality of meanings
induced by the indeterminacy of texts detached from their authors. This
indeterminacy is less obvious in spoken language or discourse, where speakers
claim authority over the interpretation of their own words and add to them to
ensure they have the desired effect on others. While this model of the authority
of the speaker is naive - in that people often speak without any sort of 'inner
authority' - it nevertheless captures a truth about the primacy of language as
verbal communication rather than written text. Yet, scholars' experiences with
disembodied texts subvert their models of the wider world. Ignoring the social
world, treating situated discourse as disembodied texts, leaves much of the
social order unexposed and unchallenged.
Structuralist poetics offer a temporary reprieve from this relentless relativism.
For, if the variations between cultures (and, we might add, individuals) simply
reflect a finite group of mental operations, human societies can be characterized
by a set of reversible transformations and corresponding universal invariants.
Anthropology then can seek to determine "the potentialities of the human mind
without the constraint of a particular frame of reference" (Almeida 1990: 372).
But what if these mental operations are nonlinear, irreversible operators that do
not form a group - as in the asymmetry of metaphor? If so, then human minds
can know truths that only become realizable once one commits oneself to a
particular metaphoric view of the universe. Such an epistemology of metaphor
implies a fundamental untranslatability or incommensurability between lived
worlds (cf. Rorty 1989).
Within each life world, there is another epistemological basis for belief: the
salience and immediacy of bodily-felt experience. The recognition that
metaphoric constructions are grounded in archetypal patterns allows us to
preserve a measure of universality in our theories. But bodily-felt feelings,
however simple their origins, are shaped by cultural and social factors from their
inception. If the risk of an epistemology based on the play of tropes is indeter-
minacy and relativism that threatens us with a moral vacuum (cf. de Man 1979;
Lehman 1991), the danger of an epistemology based on bodily-feeling ("gut
reactions") or convictions is that it mystifies the origin of knowledge by
confining it to a private interior. Gut feelings may, in fact, be intersubjective

truths, but unless their sources are exposed and submitted to public debate and
critique, they are indistinguishable from idiosyncratic or socially engineered
prejudice.
Social constmctivism counters this prejudice by exposing the cultural roots
and social conformity of tacit beliefs. This is a second form of the embodiment
of metaphor, not as feeling or physiology but in the exigencies of social life. The
problem with a completely public or social construetivist epistemology is that it
ignores (or manipulates) the felt-meaning of events, disenfranchises the solitary
agent, and subordinates all forms of value-creation to social ideologies. Substitut-
ing the social background of discourse for its actual claims is a way of disqualify-
ing individual voices and hence disempowering personal agency.
The alternative to these traps is to use our awareness of the poetics of
everyday language not to dissolve ethical, esthetic or psychological truth by
relativism but to penetrate closer to true, even if that truth is, in some (though
not all) respects, culturally and historically conditioned. To discern this truth we
must study both the dynamics of imagination and the way in which our
metaphoric constructions are anchored in shared worlds of experience. In this
account, metaphors are the intermediaries between the bodily-given and the
socially constructed. Like Hermes, they carry us swiftly between the heavens
and the underworld, guiding and illuminating and, in the same flight, tricking
and confusing. The metaphors we live by, though, are neither gods nor
autonomous psychic beings but inventions, built by imagination from the
materials of experience to contend with the palpable realities of our bodies and
our social beings. As it did for the hermetic philosophers, the alchemy of
metaphor grants us freedom to move between these realms.
Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry

McGill University
and
Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry
Sir Mortimer B. Davis - Jewish General Hospital
4333 COte Ste-Catherine Road
Montrgal, Qugbec H3T IE4
NOTES
1 This essay is drawn from a book in progress with the same title. I would like to thank
Byron Good, Ellen Corin, Rent Devisch, Allan Young and an anonymous reviewer for
very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.
2 For classical psychoanalysis, historical truth clearly had greater efficacy than the
inexact truth of metaphoric interpretation which nonetheless might have some suggestive
power (Glover 1931).

3 The unconscious of psychodynamic theory, which contains what has once been
admitted to consciousness but which is now repressed, is only one form of nonconscious-
ness. Other varieties of nonconscious process would include physiological functions
without sensory feedback or representation, unattended or habituated sensation and
perception, automatic rule-governed behavior, and dissociated cognitive functions. Most
family and social process is also nonconscious in the sense that the participants' thought
and action is embedded in and contributes to processes of which they are, at best, only
dimly aware. Different forms of insight may offer enhanced understanding and percep-
tion of each of these levels of process.
4 In the mathematics of group theory, the symmetry of crystals is expressed as their
invariance under transformations of rotation and reflection. Although L6vi-Strauss does
not apply group theory in any systematic way, his thought is dominated by the metaphor
of the mathematical group. Where invariants are not immediately apparent, he constructs
them by collecting symbolic materials further afield and interpreting them so as to fill the
gaps in a table of permutations and combinations. This emphasis on order coexists with
his recognition of the inescapability of disorder. As Almeida (1990) notes: "Mathematical
and physical tropes carry a heavy burden in L6vi-Stmuss's texts...There are two basic
metaphors: one based on the idea of transformation groups, whose essence is the
existence of symmetry, and the other based on the idea of the machine, whose essence is
the notion of irreversibility. The first is the "view from afar" (at its extreme, a view that is
situated nowhere). The second is central, for instance to Tristes Tropiques...with its
treatment of the passage of time and the inevitable irruption of disorder' (p. 370).
5 "Looked at from the semantic point of view, myth acquires sense only after it is
returned to its transformation set?' (IAvi-Strauss 1988; p. 12).
6 As we shall see, metaphor theory reminds us that the other terms that could be
substituted for a word, are, in fact, limitless - it is only convention (or literalness) that
restricts the choice of terms and so defines a t-mite communicative code. Outside the
formulaic and formalized codes that IAvi-Strauss searches for, this problem of the
profligacy of metaphoric meaning becomes more urgent. This also points to an important
difference between some traditional societies which contain many fixed rituals and
certain arenas of post-traditional societies which put a premium on invention.
7 This same criticism has been voiced by Friedrich (1986 p. 16): "the imagination of the
unique individual...is a central reality, perhaps the central reality, of language and of its
\ .
actualization in speech...However, given the persistent dormnance today of "structure" in

a sense that is not only societal but depersonalized, I wish, partly for heuristic reasons,
partly as a matter of conviction, to emphasize the unique imagination. This factor of the
unique imagination, in any case, works together with the ubiquity of context, the
continuousness of meaning, and verbal beauty."
8 The poet Gerard Manley-Hopkins disting!aished between the "overthought" (syntax,
statement) and "underthought" (metaphor, image) of the poem (cf. Frye 1990: p. 34).
9 Beginning to come to grips with the process of healing, Dow (1986) presents a
hierarchical model of living systems (from physiology to person to family and social
group) and links the levels by "transactional symbols." He then states that "Emotions are
the generalized media that link the self and the somatic system." (p. 64, italics in
original). What Dow attributes to emotion, I would assign to a generalized notion of
metaphor since the links between the levels in this biological hierarchy are not only
emotional but also conceptual, practical, perceptual, esthetic, and so on. As this list
indicates, metaphor is a trope for different types of relationships at different levels and so
gives us a way to speak generally about symbolic transformations.
10 If, as Friedrich (1986) insists, word soutads and meanings are conflated and condensed
not only in poetry but in everyday discourse, the heightened sensitivity to language
promoted by deconstruction has much to reveal. For example, Mahony (1984, p.
164-165) notes that, in his writing on the death instinct, Freud never used the term
"thanatos." He suggests this is because thanatos contains the name of Freud's beloved
daughter, Anna, whom he was loathe to frame by death! Here it seems at first as though
word-play has overpowered empathy - but could it be that the sound and sight of
"thanatos" was displeasing to Freud for the reasons Mahony offers? Any confidence in
this interpretation must lie in the historical and psychological details supplied by Mahony
and not in further word-play.
11 See Lehman (1991) for an account of this betrayal.
12 One apparent exception to this reductionist impulse is the archetypal psychology
growing out of the work of C.G. Jung, which treats symbols as irreducible units of
meaning with being-in-the-world (Hillman, 1983). But while the autonomy of the psyche
and its archetypes champions the life of imagination, it remains ill at ease with the
physical limits of the body and flatly ignorant of the political reality of others. Hillman
has recently come to acknowledge this deficit in his position.
13 Thus, it is important to recognize that the nodes in a semantic network analysis of the
kind done by Good (1977) are not logical atoms, or isolated propositions or even images
but whole regions of knowledge/practice/experience situated in the world. Neither the
nodes nor the networks are of only one kind. Where it reproduces associations heard in
conversation with an informant, the semantic network is a model of a stretch of discourse
that must, itself, be situated within the intersecting enterprises of ethnographer and
informant. When it aims to present a generalized model, the network diagram does not
represent what is in the head of an informant but is a map of an idealized social world
constructed by the ethnographer.
14 Talk of the bodily-grounding of metaphor often conceals a fundamental evasion. For
there are two ways of conceiving of the body as a ground for experience: one
phenomenological and the other biological. The phenomenological body appears as
salient qualia of experience in introspective accounts. The biological body is studied from
the outside as a physical entity, by naturalistic observation and experiment. Neither is an
infallible source of truth: Phenomenology is suspect because it lacks tools for distinguish-
ing between imagination or secondary elaboration and primary experience (e.g., body
image vs. bodily sensation). There is ample evidence for the fallibility of introspection
(cf. Dennett 1991). On the other hand, to deal with psychological and experiential
phenomena, biology must acknowledge the reality of the subjective, phenomenological
categories and qualia of experience. The best picture of the body we have then comes
from correlating the two sorts of knowledge. For this reason, I situate the bodily-
grounding of metaphor not in some disembodied literary space nor in the contentless
abstractions of phenomenology, but in the qualities of sensory-affective experience on the
one hand and in the knowledge we obtain about the body and its workings from
pragmatic experiments which include biology.
15 This view of archetype is, in fact, quite close to one of Jung's usages. For Jung, the
fact of the widespread recurrence of certain images (the great mother, the hero, the wise
old man) provides evidence for archetypal patterns. The images themselves do not,
however, constitute the archetype; they only point toward the archetypal process which,
being a contentless pattern or propensity, is itself ineffable. See Samuels (1985) for a
lucid discussion of notions of archetype in Jungian psychology. My use of archetype
differs substantially from Jung's in two respects: (i) explicitly recognizing the social
origins of many universal givens in experience; (ii) not viewing the archetypes as
inherently (necessarily) numinous. The experience of awe or naminosity, in my view,
stems from the momentary coordination of archetype and myth through metaphor. This
gives rise to the powerful feeling "It all fits together."
16 Friedrich (1986) argues against the use of metaphor as the master trope, even in its
more limited and literal application to linguistic figures: "The omnium gatherum use of
metaphor reflects Aristotle, more recent theory, and some ethnic, historical, and personal
biases. Even in its narrow meaning the role of metaphor varies enormously between
poems, poets, poetic traditions, and cultures; the salience of metaphor as trope is low, for
example, in some American Indian traditions" (p. 30). He suggests the value of keeping
metaphor separate from irony, parallelism, gist, riddle and metonymy in linguistic
analysis and offers his own rough taxonomy of tropes: imagistic, modal, analogical,
formal-constructional, expansion-condensation (p. 29). He goes on to note, though, that
"within any such scheme a given trope will have to be cross-classified because each
trope, while partly independent, also partly interdepends with other tropes..." This leads
us back to the argument for the validity of naming a master trope that governs this
network of inter-relationships - and from Aristotle through Vico, to current literary
theory, metaphor has generally held this priveleged position. While Friedrich believes
that processes of analogy and association are more psychologically fundamental, much
current work in cognitive science gives primacy to metaphor (cf. Ballim, Wilks and
Bamden 1991; Lakoff, 1987).
17 Just this is depicted in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, (1990) which
provides a helpful counter-metaphor to Calvino's algebra of images.
18 Useful accounts of the therapeutic use of metaphor may be found in Hobson (1985)
and Siegelman (1990). Even where therapists do not conceive of their utterances as
explicitly metaphoric they are easily recognized as such.
19 I am indebted to Dr. Jacqueline Carroll for the first three case examples. Details have
been changed to protect client confidentiality.
20 A similar technology of images is described by Guedon (1984) in the Tshimshian
shaman's practice. The word magic examined by Tambiah (1968) is a simpler form of
this metaphoric transformation in which sensory qualities are transferred from one object
or event to another through symbolic action. Fernandez (1986) provides a more general
account of the use of metaphor in ritual to move through sensory-affective quality space.
21 McMullen counted instances of metaphors other than completely conventional idioms
- i.e. she ignored common everyday figures of speech with no special significance to the
case; figures unrelated to the therapy theme; figures that were frequently used by clients
and therapists in general unless they were specifically related to the specific therapy
theme. Ignoring so much dialogue may mitigate her conclusions.
22 Antecedent client characteristics that might determine both effective use of metaphor
and good therapeutic outcome include (McMullen, 1989: p. 221ff): (1) more cohesive
self-image reflected in more consistent use of figurative language; (2) better self-
understanding reflected in more well-formed figures; (3) better ability to express self and
emotion in words (hence more apt use of metaphor); (4) willingness to reveal and express
emotions through metaphors that present the self in a more intimate light; (5) ability to
work through problems by staying within a productive metaphor.
23 The regulation of emotional intensity by metaphor is central to Scheff's (1979)
account of emotional catharsis. Catharsis involves both the imagery based evocation of
emotion and the linguistic framing of the experience to create adequate cognitive
"distance" so that the reliving of traumatic experience is not itself so intense and
immediate as to constitute a fresh trauma. Schieffelin (1979) shows how metaphors may
be organized to reflect the landscape of a local world to intensify their evocative power in
cathartic rituals.
24 Lrvi-Strauss (1978: p. 45) suggests that novels appeared as a literary form in Western
history just as mythical thought was passing into the background. Novels supply
narratives that take the place of myth but, by the very fact of their explicit human
authorship, they imply the possibility - which, in the absence of myth, becomes necessity
- of self-anthorship. This is a task for which most are ill-equipped; hence, the enthusiasm
for "pop" psychology and psychotherapy as forms of ghost writing one's autobiography
within a specific genre.
25 1989: Directed by Phil Alden Robinson. Based on the novel Shoeless Joe by W.P.
Kinsella (1982).
26 The emotional impact of the film reveals the relationship between myth and bodily-
felt meaning. For example, the precise moment that I began to cry in watching this film
was when one of the players, a doctor, was about to cross the line from the world of the
baseball diamond to the spectators in the bleachers to rescue the hero's daughter who was
choking. I knew (felt in my body) that crossing the line from the field to the bleachers
would mean that he would sacrifice his (heroic) identity as a player in the mythic world
of baseball for the mundane pain and temporality of his quotidian role as a healer; in
doing so, he conforms to a larger myth of the wounded-healer whose capacity to heal is
rooted in his mortality. The most personally evocative moments reflect both idiosyncratic
associations to the over-arching myth and bodily-felt knowledge of the dynamics of
liminality.
27 Johnson (1987) and Lakoff (1987) have made a start on the bodily aspect of this
grounding, but have paid less attention to the social level. Lakoff's (1987) account, which
employs "scripts" for social situations, seems ad hoc and less than compelling. What gets
left out is why, beyond developmental priority, certain forms of experience come to
dominate our thinking. This requires either a politics of metaphor (i.e., ideology) or some
form of archetypal theory.
28 The emphasis on metaphor adopted here, in which imaginal constructions have a life
of their own - resembles the perspective of archetypal psychology (Hillman 1983). But
Hillman has expressed his impatience with theories of metaphor that would bracket their
reality - insisting that some metaphors stand for archetypal images that point toward (and
originate from) the gods and so rejecting as reductionism any limits on the scope of
metaphor.
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LAURENCE J.

"I am manipulating," says the Alchemist. "No, you are

- Gaston Bachelard (1964: 55)

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatty 17: 161-195, 1993.

range of constructions and discoveries made in psychotherapy and related forms

symbolic therapies provided only that we understand metaphor in its more

INTERPRETING THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SYMBOLS

Three theories of interpretation dominate contemporary accounts of symbolic

structuralism involves a search for symmetry or the formal order of groups - a

LEvi-Strauss's understanding of the effectiveness of this ritual hinges on "the

The elaborate narrative creates a metaphoric landscape that represents the

material chain of influence to elucidate a formal correspondence. Whatever

MYTH, METAPHOR AND ARCHETYPE

impossible - all human experience and behavior is a result of interaction

to a level of coherence also found in the world beyond the C a s t l e - wherever

Metaphor occupies an intermediate realm - tentative, partial, exploratory,

detail of this metaphor holds diagnostic information on the integrity and

THE PLAYING FIELDS OF MYTH AND METAPHOR

In urban, industrialized, pluralistic societies, it seems we no longer have myths,

myth in contemporary North American society. A man in his mid-thirties with a

relationship between suggestibility and hypnosis. Suggestibility is always

For Kolakowski this is so because myth occupies a transcendental realm and, if

CONCLUSION: THE MORAL LIFE OF METAPHOR

From the perspective of metaphor theory, meaning is at once sensuous, emo-

correspond to awareness of metaphor as trope (Vosniadou and Ortony 1983;

confining it to a private interior. Gut feelings may, in fact, be intersubjective

Division of Social & Transcultural Psychiatry

power (Glover 1931).

actualization in speech...However, given the persistent dormnance today of "structure" in

Almdda, M.W. Barbosa de

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strupp, H.H., and S.W. Hadley

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