ABSTRACT
Within psychotherapy metaphor sings at the creative heart of personal narrative. Metaphor also establishes whole schools of psychological thought. Freud embraced the sexual instinct as the originating metaphor for his psychosexual theory of development. By contrast, Fritz Perls, founder of the Gestalt school of psychotherapy, rebelled against Freud partly by choosing a different bodily function – the hunger instinct. In Ego, hunger, and aggression (1969), Perls likened mental absorption of the world to stages of food consumption, his language fitting: Perls chewed on psychoanalytic theory; in response to its undigested morsels, he cooked up a set of oral defenses. Among these, introjection meant to swallow information whole, as when reporters gulp down bits of news, only to spit them back up again in the form of articles.
