metaphor Ordinary language is saturated with corporeal metaphors. We frequently speak of ‘the lip of a cup’, and ‘the legs of a table’, and use expressions like ‘the walls have ears’, ‘the interviewer kept me on my toes’, and ‘let's get to the heart of the matter’. Not only are many of our metaphorical expressions rooted in the body and our experiences of it, but metaphors, in turn, significantly shape our cultural perceptions of the body.

Definitions and interpretations

From the Greek word ‘metaphora’ meaning ‘transference’, a metaphor has generally been understood as a figurative expression which interprets a thing or action through an implied comparison with something else. Aristotle, who is usually considered the originator of ‘comparison’ theories of metaphor, described metaphors in the Rhetoric as elliptical similes — comparisons of ‘things that are related but not obviously so’ without using ‘like’ or ‘as’. According to Aristotle, the best or ‘most well liked’ type of metaphor transfers its meaning from one subject or ‘register’ to another through the principle of analogy. As Aristotle observes in the Poetics, these metaphors often depend on logical relationships between multiple terms. The metaphor ‘old age is the evening of life’, for instance, relies on the relation between a set of terms describing day and another set describing age.

Aristotelian approaches to metaphor remained largely unchallenged until 1936, when I. A. Richards offered what philosopher Max Black has termed an ‘interaction’ view of metaphor. Critiquing both Aristotle's notion of metaphor as special or ornamental use of language, and his assumption that metaphor involves the mere substitution of one term for another, Richards claimed that metaphor relies on a complex interaction of thoughts, rather than a process of linguistic substitutions. To explain how a metaphor functions as a ‘double unit’, Richards introduced the terms ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’, which refer to the ‘principal subject’ and the name of the figurative term itself, respectively. (In the metaphor ‘Juliet is the sun’, for example, ‘Juliet’ would be the tenor and ‘sun’ the vehicle.) Richards' theory of metaphor as the product of an interaction between vehicle and tenor was later refined by Max Black in his 1962 book, Models and Metaphors. In this volume, Black suggested that a metaphor acts as a ‘filter’ in which two or more subjects interact according to a ‘system of associated commonplaces’ (a shared set of cultural responses) to produce new meanings for the entire phrase or sentence. In the metaphor ‘Tom is a fox’, then, not only is ‘Tom’ viewed in terms of cultural associations of foxes as sly creatures, but ‘fox’ is also reinterpreted through its juxtaposition with a human male.

In the late 1970s, John Searle rejected both interaction and comparison theories of metaphor, and offered an understanding of metaphor based on the ‘speaker's utterance meaning’. In Expression and Meaning, his 1979 study of speech act theory, Searle criticized earlier approaches to metaphor on the grounds that they tried to locate the meaning of metaphors in the sentences or metaphorical expressions themselves. Instead, Searle suggested, we must examine the slippage between the speaker's meaning and the sentence or word meaning. In other words, metaphorical utterances work not because a certain juxtaposition of words produces a change in the meaning of the lexical elements but because the speaker's meaning differs from their literal usage. Thus phrases like ‘It's getting hot in here’ or ‘Sally is a block of ice’ function as metaphors only in certain contexts with specific truth conditions: there is no single principle according to which metaphors operate.

Despite divergent theories of the ways in which metaphors operate, twentieth-century approaches have almost uniformly attempted to broaden traditional conceptions of metaphor as special use of language, offering an understanding of metaphor as a fundamental cognitive process or structure. In short, metaphor came to be seen as ‘the omnipresent principle of language’ ( Richards), as a basic pattern of organizing and concertizing experience. No longer simply the domain of rhetoric or literary studies, metaphor has, over the past three decades, become a central topic of debate for fields like psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and the cultural studies of science.

Bodily metaphors

Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars have shown that many of our metaphorical expressions (along with much of thought itself) develop from our perceptions and experiences of the body. In her 1956 volume on reading poetry, Modern English and American Poetry, Margaret Schlauch suggested that one of the most basic types of metaphorical transfer is the naming of a new object through its resemblance to part of the body. Citing such examples as ‘headland’, ‘foothill’, ‘the face of a watch’, and ‘blind alleys’, Schlauch offered a comparison view of corporeal metaphor in which meaning is transferred from bodily parts and sensuous experiences to other objects on the basis of similarity.

Paul Ricoeur's 1978 essay, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, likewise claimed that the body should play a key role in our understanding of metaphor. In accordance with his view that there is a ‘picturing function’ of metaphorical meaning, Ricouer suggested that the term ‘figure of speech’ is rooted in our very understanding of the body as a figure. Just as the body twists and changes position, so, too, do metaphors, which ‘turn’ or ‘twist’ standard meanings through particular usages of words or phrases. According to Ricouer, figures of speech such as metaphor provide language with a ‘quasi-bodily externalization’; in making abstract or foreign concepts more tangible, metaphors ‘embody’ ideas, offering a ‘figurability to the message’.

The body's role in shaping metaphors and cognition was expanded and refined in Mark Johnson's 1987 book, The Body in the Mind. Breaking with objectivist views on metaphor and meaning, Johnson asserted that human embodiment is central not only to metaphorical projection, but also to our most basic processes of developing and articulating meaning. Johnson argued that metaphor, one of our primary cognitive structures for ordering experience, stem from fundamental embodied schema relating to the body's movements, orientation in space, and its interaction with objects. The body's general upright position in space, for instance, creates a ‘verticality’ schema, which influences numerous metaphors. When we speak of ‘upscale living’, and use expressions like ‘she's on top of it’ or ‘he was down on himself’, we are using metaphors based on a hierarchy derived from the body's orientation in space. The body's interaction with objects likewise contributes to the general metaphorical correlation of ‘up’ (as opposed to ‘down’) with ‘more’; as we observe through our bodily interactions, when we add liquid to a container or magazines to a pile, the level increases. Thus even phrases like ‘falling stock prices’ and ‘rising costs’ derive their abstract representation of quantity through basic bodily experience. Other embodied schemata that are projected through metaphorical networks include: balance, in/out, front/back, contained/uncontained, and force or weight. Although revolutionary in its examination of the ways in which human embodiment is encoded into metaphor, Johnson's work has been critiqued by feminist scholars like Katherine Hayles for its failure to account for individual and cultural bodily specificities like gender, ethnicity, and physical ability.

In addition to influencing the names we give to objects and basic patterns of metaphorical thought, the human body has also had an impact on many of the metaphors we employ to describe society. Perhaps the most prevalent of these bodily metaphors, the body politic has contributed to our understanding of institutions like the state and church since the age of Pericles in ancient Greece. Whether in Plato's Republic, where the problems of the polis are metaphorized as diseases, or St, Paul's writings, in which the Church is compared to a human body with unified ‘members’, the metaphor of the body politic has shaped the way scholars have envisioned the hierarchies and interrelationships between various elements of society. Indeed, we still speak of ‘heads of state’, ‘governing bodies’, and crime as ‘a social disease’.

Metaphors for the body

Just as the body has played a crucial role in influencing our metaphorical networks, so too have metaphors shaped our understanding of the body. Metaphors for the body are as diverse as the cultures and civilizations that have created them; however, several key metaphors can be identified as central to Western thought. Dating back to Plato's Cratylus, the metaphor of the body as a prison or house for the soul has influenced philosophical, religious, and other cultural attitudes toward the body — especially the mind/body dualism. At the heart of Plato's metaphor is the notion that the true essence of human beings lies in their soul or spirit; the body is alien, brute matter, a vessel for the soul/mind. The metaphor of the body as dungeon or house took on particular gendered implications with Aristotle's writings on the chora and reproduction, which contend that the mother merely ‘houses’ the child, providing the shapeless matter, while the father provides the form or shape. In the New Testament and other early Christian writings, the body was again conceived of as a house or temple, offering the distinction between the immortal, god-given soul and the mortal, corruptible body in which it dwells.

Another primary metaphor in Western perceptions of the body and the mind/body split is the Cartesian metaphor of the human body as a machine. Intervening in the mechanism versus vitalism debate, René Descartes suggested that the body (res extensa) could be understood as a self-moving machine composed of separate mechanisms that function according to the laws of nature. Descartes' metaphor of body as machine and its association of bodies (but not minds) with nature was fundamental in positioning the body as a universally knowable subject fit for scientific investigation. In the twentieth century, fields like art history and medicine used the body as machine metaphor in interesting new ways. Within the art world, the metaphor intersected with modernist theories of aesthetics, as artists like Fernand Léger and Marcel Duchamp depicted the body in an increasingly mechanized fashion. Drawing on earlier notions of a mechanistic body, and an understanding of the Fordist mass production system, the medical community utilized new cultural perceptions of the body through its metaphorical elaborations of the ‘Fordist body’. As described by Emily Martin in ‘The End of the Body?’, the Fordist body functioned according to principles of ‘centralized control and factory-based production’. This metaphorical conception of the body not only created a hierarchy among bodily organs, with the brain (centralized control) at the top and the other organs below, but also caused the body to be considered in terms of productivity and efficiency.

Central to much recent work on embodiment is the metaphor of the body as a text or surface upon which our cultural and personal identity is written. Though widely used by many body theorists, the metaphor is most often associated with Michel Foucault. Drawing from Nietzschean notions of the body as a site of social incision, Foucault described the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ (‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’) and as an ‘object and target of power’ (Discipline and punish). For Foucault, the body became a text or a medium on which power operates, producing culturally and historically marked subjects. Thus, as various feminist scholars have noted, cultural gender norms are ‘written’ on female and male bodies through diet, make-up, exercise, dress, footwear, and other practices. We should be careful, however, not to see the body solely as a blank slate awaiting cultural markings; as feminist philosophers Susan Bordo and Elizabeth Grosz point out, the materiality of the ‘page’ (the body itself) must be taken into consideration when we examine the ways in which bodies are culturally or otherwise inscribed.

The relationship between metaphor and the body is quite complex. Not only do metaphors affect our cultural perceptions of the body, but many of our metaphors and patterns of metaphorical cognition are shaped by our understandings of the body and embodiment. Thus, as science studies scholar Gillian Beer observes in ‘Problems of description and the language of discovery’, metaphors are both descriptive and productive. As they move from level to level, cutting across disciplines with free movement and flexibility, metaphors become an important ‘resource for discovery’; they become sites for reconceiving and recreating the body in new and exciting ways.

Christina Jarvis

Bibliography

Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington and Indianapolis.
Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind: the bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago and London.
Lakoff, G. and and Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago and London. Sacks, S. (ed) (1979). On metaphor. Chicago and London.

Metaphor

The word metaphor (from the Greek metaphor, meaning "transfer") is an important language element in both science and religion. Since the time of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, it has been understood that something strange happens in the process of creating a metaphor. Metaphors change the ways people understand things.

Common definitions of the terms metaphor, simile, and analogy are not discrete; they refer generally to the substitution of one thing for another. Authors sometimes use one term to refer to all three. For example, in his Imagery in Scientific Thought (1987), Arthur I. Miller makes heavy use of the concept of analogy but uses the terms metaphor and metaphorical, perhaps preferring the complexity, inscrutability, and sophistication of the term metaphor over the more mundane, even pedestrian, character of analogy. Among cognitive scientists, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explore implied analogy as a window into the operations of thought calling it metaphor in Metaphors We Live By (1980).

Metaphors, however, are less widely found in science and religion, the composite interdisciplinary field of academic study. When metaphor is found in science and religion (the composite field of academic study), the relevant analysis is epistemological rather than aesthetic. That is not to say that the celebrated transfer of meaning, which metaphor is traditionally understood as effecting, is not of importance in the literature of science and religion. It is to observe merely that the linguistic object called a metaphor is of less importance than the cognitive process that brings about the transfer that creates new meaning. Accordingly, this entry will emphasize the process—metaphoric process—that brings about the changes in meanings that are found when science and religion are taken to be related and interacting cognitive fields of meaning.

Metaphor and analogy

An important first step is to distinguish metaphoric process from the making of analogies—the business of comparing two things that have similar characteristics. When one of two such things is understood and the other is not, one's overall understanding can be improved by making an analogy. One could say, for example, "Theology in religion is analogous to theoretical physics in natural science." Here one is making an analogy between a component of religious scholarship and a component of research in natural science. For those who know some of the theoretical laws of physics, the character and role of theology in its domain is clarified; the reverse occurs for those who read or write theology. We are here asserting an analogical relationship between a known and an unknown, in which the analogical statement advances understanding by comparing an unknown element with a element previously known. Analogical process dominates much of formal instruction. Metaphoric process is significantly different; it occurs infrequently in the field of science and religion taken together.

Metaphoric process presupposes two different phenomena (X and Y ), each well understood within their respective field of meanings. A discovery then occurs, a gestalt-like realization that the different phenomena are the same. The effect of the discovery is to establish a host of new relationships between ancillary phenomena in the two fields, ancillary phenomena closely related with the original phenomena. Events (discoveries) of this kind serve to knit together the fabric of disparate disciplines, but not by making compromises in which one "side" must relinquish some point to gain some other. Rather, the disparate views are held together and resolved into a higher viewpoint, to use an expression of Bernard Lonergan's, much as binocular vision resolves two different flat images into a single three-dimensional view.

Many scholars, including Mary Hesse, Nelson Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, and Earl MacCormac, address the problem of understanding the metaphoric process in terms of an implied model of thought. For Hesse there is a "network of meanings"; Goodman spoke in terms of "worldmaking"; Ricoeur referred to "shift in the logical distance"; and MacCormac made use of what he called "a computational metaphor for cognition."

Metaphorical processes

Janet Martin Soskice has pointed out that religious metaphors retain their tension long after other kinds of metaphors have lost theirs. One of the most startling and perennially productive religious metaphors is the assertion in John's Epistle that "God is love" (1 John 4:8). The equation of God and love involves equating the field of traditional attributes associated with God, such as superlative potency and intelligence, with the field of meanings associated with love, here understood as human relationality at is best, including vulnerability.

In science, Isaac Newton (1642–1727) used metaphoric process by equating the mechanics of the heavens with the mechanics of earthly objects, thus generating a higher viewpoint that had a profound effect on people's lives. The "laws of the heavens" had been developed earlier by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). These laws described, in quantitative terms, the motion of the planets (the "wandering" heavenly bodies) around the sun. Mechanical "laws of the of the world" (on the surface of Earth) were given by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who could, for example, calculate the motion of a projectile or the rate of fall of an object as it fell toward the ground. Subsequently Newton, in the famous falling apple allegory, realized that Galileo's laws of falling applied to the moon as well as to terrestrial objects, and, with that metaphoric act, caused the laws of Earth to become the laws of heaven—quite a reversal. The general laws of mechanics followed, and the resulting ability to analyze mechanisms and predict mechanical behavior reliably can be understood as having reshaped one world of meanings to create a new world of meanings, one that dominated science and technology for over two hundred years.

Other examples of metaphoric statements can be found. Examples in physics include: heat is motion (Benjamin Thompson, James Prescott Joule); light is particulate as well as undulatory (Albert Einstein); energy is particulate (Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Einstein); and mass is undulatory as well as particulate (Louis de Broglie). Examples in religion include: in the midst of life we are in death (Paul); an individual's ultimate concern is that person's god (Paul Tillich); the "natural" state of existence for human beings is to be graced (Karl Rahner); and Christ is sophia and logos (Elizabeth Johnson). Possible examples in science and religion include: evil is entropic degradation and personal relativistic time is the time of the second coming of Christ.

The discovery that two persons from different disciplines are talking about the same thing is not uncommon in closely related fields and can be highly profitable. The exchange interactions of quantum physics were found to correspond to the molecular bonds of chemistry, and chemical physics was born. It remains to be seen whether productive instances can be found in disciplines separated by as much cognitive space as natural science and religion. The hope for science and religion as a valuable academic discipline in its own right depends on such possibilities and on the metaphoric process that can knit them together.

See also Models

Bibliography

gerhart, mary, and, russell, allan m. metaphoric process: the creation of scientific and religious understanding. fort worth: texas christian university press, 1984.

goodman, nelson. ways of worldmaking. indianapolis, ind.: hackett, 1978.

hesse, mary. models and analogies in science. notre dame, ind.: notre dame press, 1970.

jones, roger s. physics as metaphor. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1982.

lakoff, george, and johnson, mark. metaphors we live by. chicago and london: university of chicago press, 1980.

leatherdale, w. h. the role of analogy: model and metaphor in science. new york: elsevier, 1974.

maccormac, earl r. metaphor and myth in science and religion. durham, n.c.: duke university press, 1976.

mcfague, sallie. metaphorical theology: models of god in religious language. philadelphia, pa.: fortress press, 1982.

miller, arthur i. imagery in scientific thought: creating twentieth-century physics. boston: birkhäuser, 1985.

ricoeur, paul. the rule of metaphor: an interdisciplinary study. toronto, ont.: university of toronto press, 1977.

rogers, robert. metaphor: a psychoanalytic view. berkeley: university of california press, 1978.

schon, donald alan. displacement of concepts. london: tavistock, 1963.

soskice, janet martin. metaphor and religious language. new york: oxford university press, 1985.

mary gerhart

allan m. russell

METAPHOR. In RHETORIC, a figure with two senses, both originating with Aristotle in the 4c BC: (1) All FIGURES OF SPEECH that achieve their effect through association, comparison, and resemblance. Figures like ANTITHESIS, HYPERBOLE, METONYMY, SIMILE are all species of metaphor. Although this sense is not current, it lies behind the use of metaphorical and figurative as ANTONYMS of literal. (2) A figure of speech which concisely compares two things by saying that one is the other. A warrior compared to a lion becomes a lion: Achilles was a lion in the fight. In such usages, the perception of something held in common brings together words and images from different fields: warriors and lions share bravery and strength, and so the warrior is a lion among men and the lion is a warrior among beasts.

Description

When introducing students to the idea of metaphor, teachers have generally adopted the approach of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (1C AD), using the simpler figure simile (He fought like a lion) as a way in to the more complex metaphor (He was a lion in the fight). A typical definition on this principle is:‘A metaphor is like a simile condensed. In a simile the comparison is explicitly stated with the help of some such word as like or as, whilst in a metaphor the comparison is implied by an identification of the two things compared’ ( Ronald Ridout & Clifford Witting, The Facts of English, 1964). Such descriptions have helped generations of students recognize metaphors, but do not comment on the creative process at work. Aristotle provided a formula for creating metaphors which pointed to something inherent in all kinds of comparison. He proposed a ratio (análogon) of the type A is to B, as X is to Y, exemplified as Life is to old age, as day is to evening. This ratio demonstrated that life and day can come together because of a third shared factor, time. He then switched the second terms to get A is to Y, as X is to B, producing: Life is to evening, as day is to old age. Such a cross-over creates such phrases as the evening of life and day's old age (Poetics, 31. 11). Here, terms from distinct contexts are first aligned, then spliced, demonstrating the close relationship between metaphor and ANALOGY. In 1936, the English critic I. A. Richards provided labels for the three aspects of metaphor implied by Aristotle: the original context or idea is the tenor of the metaphor, the borrowed idea is the vehicle, and the shared element the ground. In Aristotle's example, life is the tenor, day the vehicle, time the ground. Commentators, however, are not usually precise about where the metaphor proper resides: it is sometimes defined as the vehicle alone, sometimes as the combination of tenor and vehicle, and sometimes as tenor, vehicle, and ground together.

Metaphor is often used in naming and in extending the senses of words. Its capacity to name was exemplified in the US in 1966, when a group of black activists adopted the name Black Panther. At about the same time, people who disliked the police began calling them pigs. As a result, the sentence Black Panthers hate pigs could occur and be suitably interpreted in a context far removed from ‘real’ black panthers and pigs. In George ORWELL'S Animal Farm (1945), pigs stand for Communist Party members, dogs for the police, and humans for the Russian ancien régime. Because of the meanings given to pig and man, the story's close is particularly potent as a comment on the fate of revolutions:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Extended metaphors

Orwell's tale is an ALLEGORY, based on the master metaphor ‘farm is to state as animals are to citizens’, and its plot runs parallel to real life. The result of its use throughout a text is an extended metaphor, a device which can operate at many levels of speech and writing. The same imagery may run through a text, as a writer develops an analogy between the topic of immediate interest and another topic considered relevant and informative:
The architect delivers a number of completely impersonal plan drawings and typewritten specifications. They must be so unequivocal that there will be no doubt about the construction. He composes the music which others will play. Furthermore, in order to understand architecture fully, it must be remembered that the people who play it are not sensitive musicians interpreting another's score…. On the contrary, they are a multitude of ordinary people ( S. E. Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 1959).

Here, the writer splices architecture and music, so that tenor and vehicle run together through the whole paragraph.

Metaphoric networks

In addition to this extension of a theme through a single discourse, networks of metaphor criss-cross language at large, especially in the form of IDIOMS and sayings. In PROVERBS, similar advice may be proffered through different images: A stitch in time saves nine, Look before you leap, Don't count your chickens before they're hatched, Don't cross your bridges before you come to them. Idioms all drawn from the same source may reflect a significant element in a society and culture: for example BrE cricketing expressions, used to talk about arguments, contests, and life itself. A politician might go in to bat in the House of Commons, intent on knocking the Opposition for six, only to be clean-bowled, stumped, or caught out by an opponent. If people do things off their own bat, they do them without help from anyone else, and if they live to be a hundred, they knock up their century, in which case they have had a (jolly) good innings. The master metaphor animating such usages can be compactly expressed as: Life is a Game of Cricket.

The universality of metaphor

Because metaphor is so pervasive in linguistic and cultural terms, it is often seen as central to thought and ordinary, non-literary language. In such speculation, the broader Aristotelian interpretation of metaphor is evoked. Language is seen as a system of SYMBOLS running parallel to reality, its purpose to blend form and meaning. All models of existence are associative make-believe: ‘Existence is like X or Y’, ‘It is as if there were a Heavenly Father’, or as T. R. Wright has put it: ‘If narrative is the way we construct our sense of identity, metaphor is how we think, especially in areas in which we need to build our knowledge of the unknown by comparison with the known’ (Theology and Literature, 1988). He adds that theology ‘has always been irredeemably riddled with metaphor’. The Christian Gospels ‘make Jesus repeatedly risk and often suffer the misunderstanding of the literal-minded’, so that in Matthew (16: 6–7) the disciples say that they have no bread when Jesus warns them against accepting the leaven of the Pharisees, while in John (3: 4) Nicodemus wonders how a man can enter his mother's womb a second time so as to be ‘born again’. Most religions and ideologies are imaginative in the shapes they lend reality, asserting the virtues of Image X over Picture Y or Model Z. Wright considers that it is not so important to replace one metaphor with another (‘addressing God continually as Mother instead of Father, She rather than He’) as to understand the processes involved in concretizing infinity and ‘recognize the metaphorical status of all these terms’.

Dead metaphors

Whether such a status is recognized or not, metaphors and models tend to have a time of vigour, after which they may ‘fade’ and ‘die’. Traditionally, those that have lost their force have been called dead metaphors; as such, they may still continue in service as CLICHÉS and hackneyed expressions. Many venerable metaphors have been literalized into everyday items of language: a clock has a face (unlike human or animal face), and on that face are hands (unlike biological hands); only in terms of clocks can hands be located on a face. Again, decide began as a metaphor, where Latin decidere meant to cut through something in order to achieve a conclusion or a solution. In their turn, conclusion and solution were once metaphorical (Latin concludere to shut up, and solvere to unfasten). The deadness of a metaphor and its status as a cliché are relative matters. Hearing for the first time that ‘life is no bed of roses’, someone might be quite swept away by its aptness and vigour. See FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, MIXED METAPHOR, PERSONIFICATION.

METAPHOR

Metaphor is a figure of speech that involves designating one thing with the name of another, a process that is carried out essentially by substituting one term for another.

Metaphor is a fundamental notion that Jacques Lacan introduced in relation to his thesis that "the unconscious is structured like a language." He justified its legitimacy principally by analogy with the Freudian mechanism of "condensation," and more generally in relation to the structure of the formations of the unconscious and the metaphorical process of the Name-of-the-Father.

Lacan proposed the following symbolic formula for metaphor (2002, p. 190):

The Lacanian use of metaphor is founded on the principle of a signifying substitution that promotes the authority of the signifier over that of the signified. In language, metaphorical substitution most often occurs between two terms on the basis of semantic similarity. At the level of unconscious processes, this similarity is not always immediately apparent, and only a series of associations can bring it to light.

Thus Freudian condensation plays a role in the different unconscious formations, such as dreams and symptoms, for example. Just as the unconscious material in dreams, telescoped by condensations, reappears in a meaningless form in the manifest dream content, so the symptom expresses, in reality, something completely different from what it appears to mean.

The metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, as it was called by Lacan, is based on the same principle—that of the substitution of signifiers. In this case, the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father substitutes for the signifier of the mother's desire, which thus becomes the object of repression and becomes unconscious.

The "fort/da game" that Freud described (1920g) directly attests to the process of metaphorization and the repression that is linked to it. A relation of signifying substitution is established by the child as soon as they "name" the signifying reference to the father as the cause of the mother's absences. In addition to the paternal metaphor, which makes it possible, the fort/da game is also inscribed in a double metaphorical process. In itself, the reel is already a metaphor for the mother, and the game of its presence and absence is another metaphor since it symbolizes her departure and return.

JoËl Dor

See also: Condensation; Displacement; Forgetting; Formations of the unconscious; Letter, the; Linguistics and psychoanalysis; Matheme; Metonymy; Mirror stage; Name-of-the-Father; Phobias in children; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Signifier; Signifier/signified; Signifying chain; Symptom/sinthome; Topology.

Bibliography

Dor, Joël. (1998). Introduction to the reading of Lacan: The unconscious structured like a language (Judith Feher Gurewich and Susan Fairfield, Eds.). New York: Other Press, 1998.

Freud, Sigmund. (1920g). Beyond the pleasure principle. SE, 18: 1-64.

Lacan, Jacques. (2002).Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton.

met·a·phor / ˈmetəˌfôr; -fər/ • n. a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable: “I had fallen through a trapdoor of depression,” said Mark, who was fond of theatrical metaphors | her poetry depends on suggestion and metaphor. ∎  a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, esp. something abstract: the amounts of money being lost by the company were enough to make it a metaphor for an industry that was teetering. DERIVATIVES: met·a·phor·ic / ˌmetəˈfôrik/ adj. met·a·phor·i·cal / ˌmetəˈfôrikəl/ adj. met·a·phor·i·cal·ly / ˌmetəˈfôrik(ə)lē/ adv.

metaphor [Gr.,=transfer], in rhetoric, a figure of speech in which one class of things is referred to as if it belonged to another class. Whereas a simile states that A is like B, a metaphor states that A is B or substitutes B for A. Some metaphors are explicit, like Shakespeare's line from As You Like It : "All the world's a stage." A metaphor can also be implicit, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet LXXIII, where old age is indicated by a description of autumn:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
  Where yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
  Bare ruined choirs, where once the sweet birds sang.

metaphor, the transfer of a name or descriptive term to an object different from, but analogous to, that to which it is properly applicable, e.g. ‘abysmal ignorance’. Mixed Metaphor is the application of two inconsistent metaphors to one object.

Empson defines metaphor as the first of his Seven Types of Ambiguity.

metaphor Figure of speech that draws a comparison. It differs from ordinary comparisons in its inventiveness, and from a simile in the complexity of the idea expressed. ‘Fleece as white as snow’, is a simile, whereas ‘His political life was a constant swimming against the tide’, is a metaphor.

metaphor a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable. Recorded from the late 15th century, the word comes via French and Latin from Greek metaphora, from metapherein ‘to transfer’.

metaphor XVI. — (O)F. mėtaphore or L. metaphora — Gr. metaphorā́, f. metaphérein transfer; see META-, BEAR2.
So metaphorical, metaphorically XVI.

metaphor •chaffer, gaffer, Jaffa, kafir, Staffa •alfalfa, alpha, Balfour, Wadi Halfa •camphor, chamfer •Luftwaffe •laugher, staffer •heifer, zephyr •chafer, trefa, wafer •cockchafer •feoffor, reefer •differ, sniffer •pilfer • titfer • umbellifer • Jennifer •conifer • apocrypha • thurifer •crucifer, Lucifer •Potiphar • aquifer •cipher, encipher, fifer, Haifa, knifer, lifer •coffer, cougher, Offa, offer, proffer, quaffer, scoffer •golfer • phosphor • Forfar • Altdorfer •chauffeur, gofer, goffer, gopher, loafer, Nuku'alofa, Ophir, shofar, sofa •Fraunhofer •hoofer, loofah, opera buffa, roofer, spoofer, tufa, woofer •waterproofer •bluffer, buffer, duffer, puffer, snuffer, suffer •sulphur (US sulfur) • telegrapher •calligrapher, serigrapher •autobiographer, bibliographer, biographer, cartographer, choreographer, cinematographer, crystallographer, geographer, Hagiographa, hagiographer, iconographer, lexicographer, lithographer, oceanographer, palaeographer (US paleographer), photographer, pornographer, radiographer, stenographer, topographer, typographer •philosopher, theosopher •metaphor • Christopher • surfer •Bonhoeffer • windsurfer