Metaphor occupies a position of exceptional theoretical weight across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning not merely as a rhetorical ornament but as a constitutive principle of mind, language, and psychological transformation. Julian Jaynes argues that metaphor is ‘the very constitutive ground of language’ and the mechanism by which consciousness itself was constructed — a thesis that reframes metaphor from decorative device to cognitive foundation. Iain McGilchrist extends this neurologically, situating live metaphor in the right hemisphere and dead metaphor in the left, insisting that ‘the metaphor we choose governs what we see.’ James Hillman, from within archetypal psychology, elevates metaphor to an ontological instrument: soul-as-metaphor is not a figure of speech but ‘an instrument of soul-making,’ the means by which psyche transposes and releases buried significance. Marion Woodman, citing Jung, identifies metaphor as ‘the healing symbol,’ capable of acting simultaneously on mental, imaginative, and emotional registers. Derrida’s extended treatment in ‘White Mythology’ deconstructs the philosophical tradition’s dependence on solar and visual metaphors, arguing that philosophy is itself a graveyard of effaced metaphors. Otto Rank and Bruno Snell trace metaphor’s anthropological and linguistic roots, while Anne Carson locates it at the triangulating point of eros and semantic impertinence. The central tensions are: whether metaphor discloses or conceals truth; whether it is the origin or the limit of philosophical language; and whether its healing power depends on its remaining alive rather than becoming cliché.
metaphor is not a mere extra trick of language, as it is so often slighted in the old schoolbooks on composition; it is the very constitutive ground of language.
Jaynes argues that metaphor is not ornamental but the foundational mechanism through which language grows and by which consciousness is structured.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976thesis
metaphor serves a psychological function: it becomes an instrument of soul-making rather than a mere ‘figure of speech’ because it transposes the soul’s questioning about its nature to a mythopoesis of actual imagining.
Hillman redefines metaphor as the operative mode of soul itself — not rhetorical embellishment but the mechanism of psychological creation and depth.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Jung called metaphor ‘the healing symbol.’ According to Jung, metaphor affects the person on three levels: the mental level on which we interpret meaning, the imaginative level, where the actual transforming power resides, and the emotional level connected to the feelings embodied in the metaphor.
Woodman transmits Jung’s therapeutic valorization of metaphor as a triply operative healing instrument that temporarily restores psychic wholeness.
, Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman, 1993thesis
All understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see.
McGilchrist argues that metaphor is epistemologically foundational — the selection of a governing metaphor determines the very structure of understanding and perception.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
it is because the metaphoric is plural from the outset that it does not escape syntax; and that it gives rise, in philosophy too, to a text which is not exhausted in the history of its meaning.
Derrida contends that metaphor’s irreducible plurality prevents philosophy from mastering its own figurative ground, generating textual excess beyond any intended meaning.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
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 frames metaphor as a live verb-like act — a triangulating, splitting, dynamic force that names the unnameable and produces semantic meaning through interaction and ‘impertinence.’
, Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay, 1986thesis
Metaphor, then, always carries its death within itself. And this death, surely, is also the death of philosophy.
Derrida argues that metaphor’s self-erasure — its tendency to die into literality — mirrors and enacts the philosophical tradition’s own structural blindness to its figurative foundations.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
how we go about understanding metaphor – by breaking it up into parts, or by seeing it as itself part of a much bigger phenomenon? Although all language may be in origin metaphorical, many of the metaphors are now dead.
McGilchrist raises the epistemological question of whether metaphor is best grasped analytically or holistically, distinguishing live metaphor from dead linguistic sediment.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
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 cites neuroscientific research establishing that live, novel metaphor — not cliché — is the province of the right hemisphere, grounding his broader hemispheric argument in empirical evidence.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
All the onomatism which dominates the theory of metaphor, and the entire Aristotelian doctrine of simple names is elaborated in order to assure harbors of truth and propriety.
Derrida argues that the Aristotelian theory of metaphor is organized to contain metaphor’s destabilizing movement and secure the ‘proper’ as an anchor of truth.
, 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’s heliotrope figure demonstrates how the solar metaphor at philosophy’s center is itself a metaphor, destabilizing any claim to a proper or literal origin.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
We operate upon this by some similar, more familiar thing, called a metaphier. Originally, of course, the purpose was intensely practical, to designate an arm of the sea as a better place for shellfish.
Jaynes grounds the mechanism of metaphor — metaphrand and metaphier — in practical cognitive necessity, showing how conceptual spaces like ‘mind’ are built from embodied, material metaphiers.
, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976supporting
this abyss of metaphor will never cease to stratify itself, simultaneously widening and consolidating itself: the (artificial) light and (displaced) habitat of classical rhetoric.
Derrida describes metaphor as an abyss that perpetually deepens within philosophical and rhetorical discourse, always already embedded in the definition of itself.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Metaphor thus, as an effect of mimesis and homoiosis, the manifestation of analogy, will be a means of knowledge, a means that is subordinate, but certain.
Derrida reconstructs the Aristotelian position in which metaphor, as mimetic analogy, provides genuine though subordinate knowledge — more philosophical than history, less than philosophy itself.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Philosophical language, a system of catachreses, a fund of ‘forced metaphors,’ would have this relation to the literality of natural language.
Derrida, via Fontanier, characterizes philosophical language as essentially catachrestic — a system of forced metaphors that transform linguistic functioning without creating new signs.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Science and mathematics both attest to this intuitive form of understanding – and in the case of mathematics it is clearly the most important form of understanding. It happens not by going through intermediary steps, but by seeing the whole in a new way.
McGilchrist links metaphorical insight to the holistic, non-analytical mode of understanding that underlies scientific and mathematical discovery.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The metaphor, then, refers either to a function or to a resemblance — i.e. either to an activity, which is the concern of the verb, or to a property, which is described by an adjective.
Snell classifies metaphor according to its grammatical and functional basis, distinguishing functional from resemblance-based metaphors as a foundation for understanding language’s cognitive evolution.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
Not so the metaphors which spring from the verb. ‘The sail sits in place,’ or ‘The hand of the clock sits on 3 p.m.,’ are statements which cannot be expressed in any other manner, unless we resort to yet another metaphor.
Snell argues that verb-derived metaphors possess a necessity absent from sensory-resemblance metaphors, because they uniquely capture the animistic character of language applied to inanimate motion.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
The End of the World is, therefore, metaphoric of our spiritual beginning rather than our harsh and fiery ending.
Campbell argues that religious metaphors must be read in their connotative depth rather than literally, and that the failure to do so produces impoverished or destructive spirituality.
, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, 2001supporting
the self-creative development of language seems to be a precondition of higher culture. One of the first and most essential steps of this higher development of language is the macrocosmization of the (already named) parts of the body.
Rank traces the anthropological genesis of metaphor in the transference of bodily terms to cosmos, identifying this macrocosmization as foundational to cultural and linguistic development.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
Analogy is metaphor par excellence. Aristotle emphasizes this point often in the Rhetoric. ‘Liveliness is got by using metaphor by analogy and by being graphic.’
Derrida documents Aristotle’s privileging of analogical metaphor as the highest and most vivid form, the model against which other metaphoric types are measured.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
‘What is called unpacking a metaphor is in certain respects much like laying out the kinds of story that are entailed by the metaphor.’
Frank, drawing on Schafer, argues that metaphor functions in illness narratives as an implicit storyline — unpacking it reveals the narrative structure that organizes embodied suffering.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995supporting
owing to readiness to grasp in the image only the meaning, image and meaning are no longer distinguished, and the image directly affords only the abstract meaning itself instead of a concrete picture.
Derrida, via Hegel, traces the process by which live metaphors die into literal expressions through habitual use, losing the tension between image and meaning.
, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
Finding in understandings of disease either a conscious or an unconscious metaphor is not a new idea. The concept is an ancient one, and also one intriguingly revived in twentieth-century cultural analysis.
Kurtz notes that disease functions historically as a metaphor for moral and social conditions, illustrating how metaphor operates in cultural self-understanding beyond strictly literary contexts.
, Not God A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, 2010aside
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 invokes metaphor in passing to illustrate how all language ultimately grounds out in embodied reality, using Wittgenstein’s spade image as a self-referential example.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside
the peculiar mark of Homeric language is the simile, whose diminutive we still recognize in the ‘ornamental’ adjective.
Rank identifies the Homeric simile as an archaic linguistic form related to metaphor, pointing toward the origin of metaphorical thinking in epic cultural memory.
, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932aside