"It Was and It Was Not": Metaphoric Tension in Psychoanalysis

The author endeavors to reassess how metaphor functions psychoanalytically by distinguishing it from more inclusive conceptualizations of symbolism and metaphor, and from the idea of metaphor as a primary cognitive structure. The author adapts aspects of Ricoeur's metaphor theory, and explores metaphor as organized around tensions of similarity and difference, and of something "being and not-being" simultaneously. Such a model anchors metaphoric meaning in the subject's capacity for metaphoric experience and its relation to unrealized unconscious meaning. The author suggests that this perspective on metaphor-which connects it experientially to mature transitional experience, sublimation, play, and mourning-helps us understand how metaphoric experience functions as our most potent agent of intrapsychic change.