Introduction

This chapter examines the cognitive turn that inaugurated the current apotheosis with a look at the work of Max Black and other theorists of the modern view. It explores the contributions of Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida for insights into metaphorical thought as the "other" of conceptual determinism. Metaphor sows the disciplinary ground with ambiguity and paradox. Although metaphor loosens or dissolves the semantic petrifaction in which fundamentalisms adhere, it works both sides of the literalist divide. Metaphor enacts ways of seeing, and it appears unconcerned whether the sight it engenders is so bright as to be blinding. The displacement of "the metaphorical drive" from poetic to analytic articulation transposes "stands, positions, gestures, styles" into the ubiquity, indeed the basic human condition, of psychopathic behavior. Metaphor theory extends to many disciplines and covers multiple approaches; the contents are selected for what they add to the argument for the metaphorical basis of imaginal psychology.