ABSTRACT
The benign view of metaphors emphasizes their creativity and fecundity. Certain metaphors indeed have the potential to blast us to a new level of appreciation or understanding. They move us through imagery and past experiences to a more edifying awareness. After encountering them we are somewhere that previously seemed unapproachable. How limited we would be without the generative jolt provided by metaphors. But while the literature touting metaphors from this perspective has a liberating impact on thought, its fascination with creative lunges stimulated by selfconscious analysis of metaphorical structures can easily lapse into an undersocialized, decontextualized embrace of “productive” metaphors.
