Thomas Ogden on the Use of Metaphor in Psychotherapy

Miniature (capital S) from a manuscript of the Roman de la poire, 13th century. This is the earliest known visual depiction of a lover handing his heart to his mistress. Caption by BNF: Atelier du Maître de Bari. La dame de Thibaud et Doux Regard.

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

R.D. Laing on Psychosis and ‘Ontological Security’

Separation in porous and dense membranes. Source: Michele Ongis. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Biological birth is a definitive act whereby the infant organism is precipitated into the world. There it is, a new baby, a new biological entity, already with its own ways, real and alive, from our point of view. But what of the baby’s point of view? Under usual circumstances, the physical birth of a new living organism into the world inaugurates rapidly ongoing processes whereby within an amazingly short time the infant feels real and alive and has a sense of being an entity, with continuity in time and a location in space.

In short, physical birth and biological alive-ness are followed by the baby becoming existentially born as real and alive. Usually this development is taken for granted and affords the certainty upon which all other certainties depend. This is to say, not only do adults see children to be real biologically viable entities but they experience themselves as whole persons who are real and alive, and conjunctively experience other human beings as real and alive. These are self-validating data of experience.

The individual, then, may experience his own being as real, alive, whole; as differentiated from the rest of the world in ordinary circumstances so clearly that his identity and autonomy are never in question; as a continuum in time; as having an inner consistency, substantiality, genuineness, and worth; as spatially co-extensive with the body; and, usually, as having begun in or around birth and liable to extinction with death. He thus has a firm core of ontological security.

This, however, may not be the case. The individual in the ordinary circumstances of living may feel more unreal than real; in a literal sense, more dead than alive; precariously differentiated from the rest of the world, so that his identity and autonomy are always in question. He may lack the experience of his own temporal continuity. He may not possess an over-riding sense of personal consistency or cohesiveness. He may feel more insubstantial than substantial, and unable to assume that the stuff he is made of is genuine, good, valuable. And he may feel his self as partially divorced from his body.

It is, of course, inevitable that an individual whose experience of himself is of this order can no more live in a ‘secure’ world than he can be secure in himself. The whole ‘physiognomy’ of his world will be correspondingly different from that of the individual whose sense of self is securely established in its health and validity. Relatedness to other persons will be seen to have a radically different significance and function.

To anticipate, we can say that in the individual whose own being is secure in this primary experiential sense, relatedness with others is potentially gratifying; whereas the ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security.*

If a position of primary ontological security has been reached, the ordinary circumstances of life do not afford a perpetual threat to one’s own existence. If such a basis for living has not been reached, the ordinary circumstances of everyday life constitute a continual and deadly threat.

Only if this is realized is it possible to understand how certain psychoses can develop.

from Laing, R. D. (1965). The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (Revised ed. edition). Penguin.

* This formulation is very similar to those of Harry Stack Sullivan, Lewis B. Hill, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Silvano Arieti in particular. Paul Federn, although expressing himself very differently, seems to have advanced a closely allied view.

Iain McGilchrist: ‘Relationships are More Foundational than the Things Related’

Cerebral hemispheres. Source: Database Center for Life Science (DBCLS). Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.1 JP.

‘The world is not just a set of separately existing localized objects, externally related only by space and time,’ writes Tim Maudlin, Professor of Philosophy and Physics at NYU. ‘Something deeper, and more mysterious, knits together the fabric of the world.’ 6 Indeed, according to Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins, ‘to see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.’ 7

Reductionism envisages a universe of things — and simply material things at that. How these things are related is viewed as a secondary matter. However, I suggest that relationships are primary, more foundational than the things related: that the relationships don’t just ‘connect’ pre-existing things, but modify what we mean by the ‘things,’ which in turn modify everything else they are in relationship with.

That is because what we are dealing with are, ultimately, relations, events, processes; ‘things’ is a useful shorthand for those elements, congealed in the flow of experience, that emerge secondarily from, and attract our attention in, a primary web of interconnexions. I have nothing against things, provided we don’t see them as primary.

In our ordinary ways of thinking, things must be established before there can be relationships, and so this about-turn should seem paradoxical; but as I shall explain, paradox very often represents a conflict between the different ‘takes’ afforded by the two hemispheres [of the brain]. However, we must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not. 8

This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level. The failure to observe this principle underlies some of the current misconceptions of both science and philosophy.

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the [brain’s] left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a viritual image: an infinitely thin, immobile fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole.

From a standpoint within the re-presentation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivation of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation — one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow.

On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalized version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life — the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real.

Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

from McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva Press.

6 Maudlin, T. (1998). Part and whole in quantum mechanics. In E. Castellani (Ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics (pp. 46–60). Princeton University Press.
7 Henry, R. C. (2005). The mental universe. Nature, 436(7047), 29. https://doi.org/10.1038/436029a
8 See pp. 641 & 813-6