Metaphors and their Storylines

Daniel Goldin, PsyD

Aristotle believed that having a grasp of metaphor was a sign of genius, as it "implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilarities." Freud saw this metaphoric grasping together in the art of the dreamer, who compresses into a single story a day's worth -- perhaps even a life's worth -- of important stories. He compared the metaphoric mandate of condensation implicit in the dream work to the task an illustrator faces in coming up with a single illustration to represent the day’s headlines. This talk aims to trace the hidden imaginative process behind this process of augmenting through reduction, of compressing dissimilar ideas into one working parable. Both the dreamer and the analyst follow invisible immaterial schemas or storylines that serve as a kind of procedure for the telling of a story but are not the story itself. Like the symmetry of a group of marbles, a storyline has no existence of its own -- symmetry cannot be separated out from the grouping of marbles nor a storyline from its story -- and yet both have the power to organize other groupings and other stories. They have an immaterial coding power. We psychoanalysts have divided ourselves into tribes, each arguing in favor of one site of psychoanalytic change -- the here-and-now -- the transference -- the so-called real relationship - dreams -- trauma -- infancy -- the self-self-object matrix -- moving from dissociation to conflict -- but our true art lies in following a structural invariant that invisibly organizes our imaginings together in all these realms, following it wherever it may lead with a certain faith in the rule

of metaphor.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

After attending the program in its entirety, attendees will be able to:

1. Specify how "a larger story" shapes and constrains the conjoined imaginings of analyst and analysand.
2. Identify the concrete or bodily source of the common metaphors by which they understand experience.

7:30 - 7:35 pm | Introduction

7:35 - 8:30 pm | Presentation by Dr. Goldin

8:30 - 9:00 pm | Presenter-led question and answer session