ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at metaphor from an evolutionary perspective to understand how our species became so steeped in metaphor that it has become, as Nietzsche observed, central to human existence. The chapter begins with a presentation of an autistic patient in psychoanalysis with insufficient psychic skin as Esther Bick describes, and a lack of ‘metaphoricity’. This case and others indicate to the author that metaphoricity correlates with normal human functioning. Considering the maternal behaviors of our evolutionary cousins, the chimpanzees, and that conceptual metaphors derive from bodily experience and are nonverbal, the author describes a hypothetical scene in prehistory where a hominid mother and infant are faced with an evolutionary loss that threatens the survival of the species. The author calls upon Darwin as well as Lakoff & Johnson, Bowlby, Tustin, Bion and Hungarian Psychoanalyst, Imre (Hermann) in her quest for an understanding of the centrality of metaphor to human life. Psychoanalysis, the author concludes, is a ritual of metaphorical engagement that allows the psychoanalytic dyad to repair the ‘metaphorical safety net’ that humans must create in the mother/infant dyad. This is critical to our social interactions as human beings and survival now, just as it was when we hovered between nonhuman primate and human being.
