Thomas Ogden on the Use of Metaphor in Psychotherapy

The aspect of analytic work to which I will now turn involves the attempt to be attentive to my own and the patient’s use of language in the hour. I experience this aspect of analytic work not as a burden to be carried, but as one of the great pleasures of being an analyst (Ogden, 1997b, c).

Analyst and analysand largely rely on indirect (symbolic) methods of communicating (primarily through the use of language) to convey something of what they are feeling to the other. In attempting to use words in this way, the patient is not so much telling the analyst what he feels as showing him and telling him through his use of language what he feels like and what he imagines the analyst feels like.

The names that we have for feelings, for example, ‘fear,’ ‘loneliness,’ ‘despair,’ ‘joy,’ and so on are generic labels for categories of feeling and often, in themselves, convey very little of the speaker’s unique, individual experience in that moment. When a patient tells me that she felt despairing over the weekend, I may ask what her despair felt like. Or if she is a patient who has difficulty knowing what she feels or even where she feels it, I might ask: ‘How did you know you were feeling despairing?’ or ‘Where in your body did you feel the despair?’

In the analyst’s and the analysand’s efforts to enquire into or to describe what despair or loneliness or joyfulness feel like, they necessarily find themselves engaged in the use of metaphor. At almost every turn, I believe that we as analysts, in our own use of language, are unconsciously teaching and learning the value of the use of metaphorical language as an integral part of the attempt of two people to convey to one another a sense of what each is feeling (like) in the present moment and what one’s past experience felt like in the past (as viewed from the vantage point of the present).

As analysts, we are also involved in learning and teaching the limits of metaphor:

‘All metaphor breaks down somewhere… It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself (Frost, 1930, p. 723).’

from Ogden, T. (1997). Reverie and metaphor: Some thoughts on how I work as a psychoanalyst. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 78, 719–732.

Frost, R. (1995). Education by poetry. In R. Poirer & M. Richardson (Eds.), Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (pp. 717–728). Library of America.

Ogden, T. H. (1997b). Some thoughts on the use of language in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 7(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889709539164

Ogden, T. H. (1997c). Listening: three Frost poems. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 7(5), 619–639. https://doi.org/10.1080/10481889709539208