psyart_ an online journal for the psychological study of the arts

8/2/2019 PsyArt_ an Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts

1/5

Search

by Zoltn Kvecses December 1, 2001Metaphor and Psychoanalysis: A cognitive linguistic view of metaphor and therapeutic discourse

abstract

In the cognitive linguistic view, three levels of metaphor can be usefully distinguished (see Kvecses, 2002, ch. 17): (1) the "supra-individual" level, (2) the

individual level, and (3) the "sub-individual" level. I suggest that each "conceptual metaphor" (as Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, call metaphors of thought, not just of

language) can be analyzed on these three levels. Most of the recent research in cognitive linguistics takes place on and is directed at one or several of these

levels. In this paper, I will try to characterize the three levels, point out some common misunderstandings concerning metaphor analysis, and show some of the

potential of this view of metaphor for psychotherapy. My goal in this paper is not to deal with any specific issues concerning the study of metaphor in

psychotherapy (such as whether

article

The supra-individual level

Let me begin with the supra-individual level of analyzing metaphors. What "supra-individual" simply means is that there is a level of metaphor that is based on

the conventionalized linguistic metaphors of a given language (such as English, Chinese, Zulu, Wolof, Hungarian, etc.). Consider some metaphorical

expressions relating to anger in English (see Kvecses, 1986, 1990; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Kvecses, 1987). People talk about "boiling" and "seething" with

anger, the angry person being "insane" with anger, "unleashing" your anger, having a "stormy" meeting in the office, a comment "getting the boss going," two

people "snarling at each other," etc. These are English words and phrases that are conventionally available to speakers to talk about their, or somebody else's,

anger. For most therapists, this is what metaphors are--words and expressions that cannot be literally true when we use them about emotions, relationships, life,

death, and other abstract topics, concepts, or domains, such as anger in the example above. Indeed, this is the most widespread view of metaphor that goes

back to Aristotle, and therapists and analysts of various persuasions have made abundant use of this view for both theoretical and practical purposes.

But the cognitive linguistic view goes way beyond the time-honored traditional conception of metaphor. Cognitive linguistic research begins where the traditional

view ends, that is, with identifying conventionalized metaphorical linguistic expressions. Researchers within the cognitive linguistic paradigm typically collect

conventionalized metaphorical expressions from dictionaries, thesauri, random other sources such as books, newspapers, magazines, and other news reports in

the media, or from their own "mental lexicon" as native speakers of a language. They then analyze these collections of conventionalized metaphorical

expressions by grouping them into what came to be called "conceptual metaphors." (Kvecses, 2000a, is a large-scale application of this procedure to the

domain of emotions.) Conceptual metaphors have a concrete source and an abstract target domain (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Kvecses, 2002). One suchgrouping of expressions that emerges from such an analysis of anger-related expressions is the following: "boilwith anger," "bepissed off," "seethe with anger,"

"make one's blood boil," "simmer down," and many others (see Kvecses, 1986, 1990; Lakoff, 1987; Lakoff and Kvecses, 1987). What makes it possible to

group these expressions together is the fact that they all have to do with a hot fluid in a container. This is a concrete conceptual domain that we call the "source

domain" of a metaphor. The target domain will be anger because it is the abstract emotion concept of anger that is the "target" of the linguistic expressions in the

source; they can all have an anger-related meaning in the appropriate context. Such a pairing of the hot fluid in a container as source with anger as target leads

us to establish the conceptual metaphor that we can put as anger is a hot fluid in a container. In other words, we can now use the term "metaphor" to refer to two

"things": metaphorical linguistic expressions (such as "boilwith anger") and conceptual metaphors (such as anger is a hot fluid in a container). I will use the term

metaphor here in primarily in the second sense.

Conceptual metaphors are constituted by what are termed "mappings." Mappings are fixed conceptual correspondences between a source and a target domain.

(On mappings, see Lakoff, 1993 and Kvecses, 2002). Mappings provide a certain structure for the abstract domain to which a source domain applies. We can

find out what the mappings are between a source and a target on the basis of the metaphorical linguistic expressions that guide us to recognize conceptual

metaphors. Let us see the mappings, or correspondences, in the case of the anger is a hot fluid in a container metaphor. We find that the container in the source

conceptually corresponds to the body of the angry person in the target (i.e., anger is seen as beinginside the body); that the hot fluid corresponds to the anger

emotion (such as in "boilingwith anger"); that the intensity of the heat of the fluid corresponds to the intensity of anger (such as in "simmering down"); that the

cause of the heat rising corresponds to the cause of anger (such as in "makingsomeone boil"). We can spell out the mappings as follows:

source: hot fluid in a container target: anger

container body

hot fluid anger

intensity of heat intensity of anger

cause of heat cause of anger

What we see here is that the source is characterized by a simple, coherent, and tightly organized knowledge structure that is utilized in understanding, or making

sense of, the target, that is, the anger emotion in the present example. This notion of imposing a coherent and tightly organized knowledge structure on the

target by means of a set of mappings has, in my view, far-reaching implications for psychotherapy. I take it that at least a large part of psychotherapy involves

achieving an understanding, or making sense of, in a coherent fashion of a difficult-to-handle emotion, a difficult life s ituation, a traumatic experience, and the

like. It is precisely the same kind of cognitive function that conceptual metaphors have in "normal" cases for "normal" people, but this function is especially

foregrounded in and relevant to the "deviant" cases encountered in psychotherapeutic and psychoanalytic practice. It is my assumption that the goal of therapy

is to achieve an understanding of our problems associated with emotions, life situations, etc., and that treatment, cure, and "insight" crucially depend on finding

such a coherent and t ightly organized knowledge structure that is mapped onto a problematic target domain.

home articles by year note to authors submission editorial process editorial board

rt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts http://www.psyartjournal.com/article/show/kvecses-metaphor_and

5 03/11/2011 1


2/5


5 03/11/2011 1


3/5


4/5


5 03/11/2011 1


5/5


psyart_ an online journal for the psychological study of the arts

Documents