Reflections on Metaphor and Affects, Arnold Modell (1997)
Metaphor
Metaphor is “the mapping of one conceptual domain onto a dissimilar conceptual domain.” Metaphor is juxtaposing two dissimilar things and through this juxtaposition showing that they are in some way similar.
Translating feelings into metaphors “provides us with some degree of organization and control,” allowing us “to organize otherwise inchoate experiences.” And not just emotions; it is difficult “to imagine any process of mentation in which metaphor does not enter.” “It is by means of metaphor that we generate new perceptions of the world; it is through metaphor that we organize and make sense out of experience.”
Memory
Affects and memory are inseparable. Gerald Edelman showed that memory is both retranscriptive and categorical. Freud himself wrote that memory was retranscriptive. This means, as stated by Richard Lane, Hanna Levenson, and Stephan Doering, that “memories of past experiences are not fixed but change with relevant new experiences, particularly ones that are emotionally potent.”
When we say that a memory is categorical, we mean that the member belongs in a certain category. When an event occurs in the present, our brain puts that event into a specific category of events and memories that belong to that category are activated. Our brains in this sense is making a metaphor between the current event and a group of past events.
Psychoanalysis
Freud pointed out that dreams are filled with metaphors. For example, he recounted a time in which a man named Mary “was awakened because the top of his bed had fallen on his cervical vertebrae. In that instant between the blow to his neck and his awakening he had an elaborate dream depicting a scene from the French Revolution in which he was an aristocratic victim being guillotined.”
Transference is a type of metaphor as it is “both a repetition of the past and a new creation.” We often help clients with transference by interpreting the transference and in so doing we demonstrate that our “emotional position differs from that of the patient's archaic object.” “The repetition compulsion can be understood as an aspect of affective memory whereby there is a compulsion to seek a perceptual identity between the past and the present.”
Metaphor is “the mapping of one conceptual domain onto a dissimilar conceptual domain.” Metaphor is juxtaposing two dissimilar things and through this juxtaposition showing that they are in some way similar.
Translating feelings into metaphors “provides us with some degree of organization and control,” allowing us “to organize otherwise inchoate experiences.” And not just emotions; it is difficult “to imagine any process of mentation in which metaphor does not enter.” “It is by means of metaphor that we generate new perceptions of the world; it is through metaphor that we organize and make sense out of experience.”
Memory
Affects and memory are inseparable. Gerald Edelman showed that memory is both retranscriptive and categorical. Freud himself wrote that memory was retranscriptive. This means, as stated by Richard Lane, Hanna Levenson, and Stephan Doering, that “memories of past experiences are not fixed but change with relevant new experiences, particularly ones that are emotionally potent.”
When we say that a memory is categorical, we mean that the member belongs in a certain category. When an event occurs in the present, our brain puts that event into a specific category of events and memories that belong to that category are activated. Our brains in this sense is making a metaphor between the current event and a group of past events.
Psychoanalysis
Freud pointed out that dreams are filled with metaphors. For example, he recounted a time in which a man named Mary “was awakened because the top of his bed had fallen on his cervical vertebrae. In that instant between the blow to his neck and his awakening he had an elaborate dream depicting a scene from the French Revolution in which he was an aristocratic victim being guillotined.”
Transference is a type of metaphor as it is “both a repetition of the past and a new creation.” We often help clients with transference by interpreting the transference and in so doing we demonstrate that our “emotional position differs from that of the patient's archaic object.” “The repetition compulsion can be understood as an aspect of affective memory whereby there is a compulsion to seek a perceptual identity between the past and the present.”
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