ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts deal in metaphor—in both our clinical exchanges and our theoretical formulations we talk about one thing by referring to another. Of course, we’re not alone: The use of metaphor probably goes back to the beginning of human thought—relatively recent examples are found in poetry four thousand years old, in ancient Egyptian poetry, in the epic of Gilgamesh. There is serious opinion that the cave paintings of Lascaux, some 30,000 years old, are visual metaphors. And the awareness of and study of the use of metaphor as a trope, or formal rhetorical device, is a Western classical pursuit—going back at least to Aristotle.
