Metaphor Space names the cognitive-psychological region constituted when spatial language is appropriated to designate the interior terrain of mind. The concept receives its most systematic treatment in Julian Jaynes, who argues that consciousness itself is structured as a metaphor space — a paraphrand generated by the wholesale transfer of physical-spatial predicates (‘back of the mind,’ ‘inner recesses,’ ‘beyond’) onto an entity that has no literal extension whatsoever. For Jaynes, spatialization is the first and most primitive feature of consciousness, the very habitat of introspection. Mark Epstein converges on this position from a Buddhist-psychotherapeutic direction, observing that both meditation and psychotherapy begin with a spatial metaphor of the self — bounded, layered, possessed of a core — and that the transformative work of either discipline requires dismantling exactly that presupposition. Iain McGilchrist approaches metaphor space neurologically, linking the living metaphor to right-hemisphere processing and arguing that all language is, in origin, metaphorical and spatial, grounding abstract concepts in embodied reality. Otto Rank supplies a mythological genealogy, tracing how bodily orientation expands macrocosmically into the language of space and time. Derrida, characteristically, deconstructs the ground from beneath the whole structure, arguing that no stable metaphor-concept distinction can be maintained, since philosophy is itself a fund of catachreses. The central tension in the corpus is whether metaphor space is a productive, generative structure of mind (Jaynes, McGilchrist) or a metaphysical illusion that conceals its own constructedness (Epstein, Derrida).
The first and most primitive aspect of consciousness is what we already have had occasion to refer to, the paraphrand of almost every mental metaphor we can make, the mental space which we take over as the very habitat of it all.
Jaynes identifies spatialization — the metaphor space of mind — as the foundational, originary structure upon which all other features of consciousness depend.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
all actions in real space taken over analogically into the space of the mind. But what is it we are making a metaphor of? We have seen that the usual function of metaphor is a wish to designate a particular aspect of a thing or to describe something for which words are not available.
Jaynes demonstrates that mind-space is constituted entirely by the analogical transfer of physical-spatial actions and predicates, raising the question of what ontological substrate the metaphor is working upon.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
When we first undertake meditation practice, the underlying operating premises about the nature of our own selves almost always involve a spatial metaphor… We all tend to think about the self as Freud did, in spatial terms: as an entity with boundaries, layers, and a core.
Epstein shows that the spatial metaphor of selfhood is the default presupposition of both psychotherapy and meditation, and that genuine transformation requires its dissolution.
, Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, 1995thesis
metaphor, which is the means of language-growth, may perhaps have been its actual source, in the sense that metaphor may once have linked concepts of time and space on the one side to notions of sound on the other.
Rank argues that the metaphorical linkage of time-space with sound constitutes a primordial act from which language and higher culture themselves derive.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932thesis
What we are talking about here is a type of essentially metaphorical understanding, of which myth, poetry, drama and ritual are all manifestations. In true metaphor the intention must remain implicit; spelling it out causes its richness and em
McGilchrist grounds metaphorical understanding in embodied experience, arguing that all knowledge ultimately returns to encounter rather than proposition, and that genuine metaphor requires its spatial-implicit dimension to remain unstated.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
those ‘somethings else’, followed far enough, return us in every case to embodied experience. What we are talking about here is a type of essentially metaphorical understanding, of which myth, poetry, drama and ritual are all manifestations.
McGilchrist argues that metaphorical understanding, rooted in embodied spatial experience, underlies myth, poetry, and ritual as its primary instantiations.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
how we go about understanding metaphor — by breaking it up into parts, or by seeing it as itself part of a much bigger phenomenon?… all language may be in origin metaphorical, many of the metaphors are now dead: in other words, there is no felt gap between the use we make of each such word in daily life and the anchor in embodied reality.
McGilchrist distinguishes living from dead metaphor by the presence or absence of a felt gap between linguistic use and embodied spatial anchor, placing hemisphere lateralization at the center of this question.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
it is not just the novelty inherent in metaphor, but the combination of novelty with the bringing together of disparate ideas that involves the right hemisphere.
McGilchrist identifies the right hemisphere as the neural locus for genuine metaphorical integration, distinguishing living metaphor from clichéd phrase on neurological grounds.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
it is language which has worked originally at the construction of ideas… the latter is an imitation of the relations of time, space and number in the realm of metaphors.
Derrida, citing Nietzsche, argues that concepts are built from metaphors that imitate relations of time, space, and number, so that the space of metaphor is also the space within which conceptual structures are erected.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
How are we to know what the temporalization and spatialization of a meaning, of an ideal object, of an intelligible tenor, are, if we have not clarified what ‘space’ and ‘time’ mean?
Derrida foregrounds the circular epistemological problem: we cannot theorize the spatialization of meaning without already presupposing what space means, destabilizing metaphor space as a stable theoretical ground.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
the (artificial) light and (displaced) habitat of classical rhetoric. Du Marsais illustrates his definition of metaphor this way: ‘When one speaks of the light of the spirit, the word light is taken metaphorically; for, just as light in the literal, proper sense makes us see corporal objects, so the faculty of knowing and perceivin’
Derrida traces how classical rhetoric constitutes metaphor as a displaced spatial habitat — a figure of light and vision — while exposing the impossibility of any clean literal/figurative distinction.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
metaphor means heliotrope, both a movement turned toward the sun and the turning movement of the sun. But let us not hasten to make of this a truth of metaphor.
Derrida deconstructs the privileged metaphor of light-as-knowledge by showing that the heliotrope (sun-metaphor) is itself a trope, so that metaphor space has no fixed orientation or center.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Let us consider the point of verbal action called ‘metaphor.’ ‘To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance’ is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor.
Carson situates Aristotle’s classical definition of metaphor as transference within an erotic epistemology of triangulation and semantic impertinence, framing metaphor as productive tension rather than mere substitution.
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986supporting
Understanding a thing is to arrive at a metaphor for that thing by substituting something more familiar to us. And the feeling of familiarity is the feeling of understanding.
Jaynes argues that all understanding operates through metaphorical substitution, so that knowing is always spatially mediated by the familiar terrain of prior experience.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
These convey more of the spatial qualities of SAC: the sense of it as a ‘safe place’ inside you, or a space or container for your thoughts and feelings; this makes them especially useful for enhancing acceptance.
Harris’s ACT framework deliberately exploits the spatial metaphor of the observing self as an interior container or sky, using metaphor space therapeutically to promote psychological acceptance.
, ACT Made Simple: An Easy-To-Read Primer on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, 2009supporting
the whole orientation of man in the world is connected with the two sides of the body (front and back)… their transference not only to the surrounding objects of nature among which man lives and with which he comes in contact, but also to the heavens and the universe.
Rank traces the macrocosmization of bodily orientation into cosmic spatial language as the anthropological root of metaphor space in myth and culture.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
Everything has to be expressed in terms of something else, and those something elses eventually have to come back to the body. To change the metaphor (and invoke the spirit of Wittgenstein) that is where one’s spade reaches bedrock and is turned.
McGilchrist asserts that all metaphorical chains terminate in the body as the irreducible ground of meaning, providing a naturalistic floor for metaphor space.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
Philosophical language, a system of catachreses, a fund of ‘forced metaphors,’ would have this relation to the literality of natural language.
Derrida, following Fontanier, characterizes philosophical language as a system of forced, extended metaphors — catachreses — rendering the entire domain of abstract thought a species of metaphor space.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside
Does not such a metaphorology, transported into the philosophical field, always, by destination, rediscover the same? The same physis, the same meaning… the same turn of the sun?
Derrida challenges any metaphorology that systematically surveys a philosophical field, arguing it inevitably reproduces the dominant metaphor of presence-as-light and forecloses genuine alterity.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside