The metaphor

The metaphor is truly awe-inspiring. The way in which, through a process both simple and complex, one transcends the word to nourish creative art is remarkable. There is something intuitive and self-evident about it that only becomes apparent in retrospect.

When metaphor is used in hypnosis, its therapeutic power shines in all its splendor.

The metaphorist then seems to become a kind of transitional object serving the unconscious.

Where the writer lays their words on a blank page, the metaphorist inscribes them on the pages of the unconscious, both their own and that of the other person. Some like to think that it is the collective unconscious itself that is at play.

A kind of spontaneous reappropriation of the meaning of each word then occurs.

It is as if, barely uttered, the unconscious simultaneously transforms meaning. The word becomes a vehicle of symbols that the unconscious feeds upon in order to transcend itself, a psychically liberating Trojan horse.

It imbues the word with a particular emotional color and uses metaphor as a therapeutic energy charge. Thus, the unconscious always finds itself within the metaphor as if it were enigmatically, almost magically, destined for it down to the smallest detail, to the very last inflection.

For the one who receives it, there is this very particular sensation that the metaphor is an emergence of what was latent deep within them, a kind of egoic birth offered to the conscious mind.

It is not uncommon for the words spoken by the metaphor-worker to lead them to astonishment, as if they had never truly belonged to them.

There would therefore be a kind of connection between unconscious minds in a process of metaphorical self-construction. The metaphorist lends their voice to the words offered by the other’s unconscious.

Metaphor would then be merely a pretext for meaning.

There is therefore something of otherness in this therapeutic process where each protagonist is engaged and inevitably transformed.

All of this is fascinating.

Rebecca Saintes

Clinical Psychologist