ABSTRACT
Buried in the common distinction between literal and metaphorical is a set of biases that makes relating to the unconscious-as-creative-source difficult. Literal and metaphorical gather two interdependent styles of consciousness that map distinct imaginal landscapes. Literalizing restricts significance for the sake of egoic mastery and maintains its hegemony by taking its fruits literally and forgetting its roots in metaphor and image. Literalized metaphors are forced to operate underground, where they dominate consciousness unawares.
Like the created work, metaphor is dynamism of specificity and open-endedness, conscious and unconscious. The hegemony of the literal compromises our creativity by polarizing and setting fact over fiction, ‘real’ over imaginal, ego over unconscious and clarity over ambiguity. Devaluing a metaphorical mode of presence represses the imaginal.
To reclaim our creative heritage, we move to the middle ground of imagination and recover literalizing as an imaginal act and the idea of the literal as a symbol. Metaphor, a model for creative work, provides the basis for teasing apart and reuniting literal and metaphorical as interdependent styles of consciousness while favoring the metaphorical for its generativity. Literalizing, which turns an ‘as-if’ into an ‘is,’ is recovered as the soul’s creative drive to incarnate imagination.
