NOTE: This exchange has taken place during the Holiday period 1999-2000,
and some of it has already been distributed to the KJF participants (please
don't). It started from material related to TA25 but went off into an unrelated
direction. Therefore it is posted here in a separate note, which will be
listed in the KJF web site. - But generally, I would think that such free
exchanges could be more adequately handled by other e-mail groups which
are set up for this. In the KJF we want to concentrate on discussion for
the authors of the Target Articles. In case you want to have your topic
discussed in the KJF, you could send in an article - this is subject to
delays, however.
- HFJM
------------------------------
Zvi Lothane to Paul Jones, TA25C2 :
<1>
Whereas I agree with your hierarchical ordering of art, science, and philosophy,
I wish to add another dimension to your dealing with metaphor. It melds
description and explanation in a new realm: that of interpretation, or Deutung,
adding a new Bedeutung, or significance, to what has been experienced and
observed.
<2>
The most important metaphor of all is the dream, and the most imortant work
on dreams in the just ending millennium, and there for all millennia to
come -- provided, of course, that mankind and MIR (curiously, the same as
'mir' in Russian) remain the same -- is Freud's Traumdeutung, The Interpretation
of Dreams, or Tolkovanie Snovidenii, as it appeared in the Russian translation.
<3>
The dream is not just wish fulfilment, Freud's unfortunate reduction under
the sway of the libido theory and the pleasure principle, which, naturally,
it is. It is a wish fulfilment in response to painful, traumatic, reality,
it is thus:
-- a historic record of that reality,
-- a reinterpretation of that reality;
-- a search for a solution to the pain.
Zvi Lothane.
Reference:
Lothane, Z. (1983). Reality, dream, and trauma. Contemporary Psychoanalysis,
19:423--443. French translation: Realite, reve, et trauma. Le Coq Heron,
No. 97, 1986.
------------------------------
Klaus Krippendorff :
<4>
it's ok to use metaphores in writing and in speech. in fact, i would say
we can't do without them. but using metaphors is very different from writing
of them.
when you say that 'the most important metaphor of all is the dream' then
you evidently have a rank-ordering of importance in mind which does not
say anything about metaphors. if you are a psychoanalyst, dreams are important
no doubt -- but note what you probably omit to say 'for your interpretive
work'. i don't deny that 'designers can have dreams'. but this is not a
metaphor rather than the statement of a possible experience.
<5>
if you want to understand metaphors then you would have to say something
about them, not merely state the importance of one. for me, a metaphor needs
a source domain,
a target domain,
a reader's construction of a superficial resemblance between the two,
entailments of knowledge from the source domain for the perception of the
target domain.
<6>
for example, the metaphor of 'messages having content' has the source domain
of containers, the target domain of written matter, the superficial resemblance
of being shippable from one location to another, from one person to another,
with the entailment that messages are containers for entities, usually called
'meanings' that senders are expected to put 'into' a message so that receivers
can 'take them out' or fail to understand their 'content'.
this is the theory in a nutshell, i wished you would spell out in which
way dreams are metaphors, how they work and what they accomplish.
klaus krippendorff
---------------------------------
Zvi Lothane :
<7>
I am delighted that you responded to my post as you did because it gives
me an opportunity to spell out what I said.
1. The metaphor is an essential component in speaking and writing: we speak
and write metaphors the way we speak and write prose. Therefore, your distinction
between using metaphors differently in speech and in writing does not hold,
not even for scientific writing, as is evident in your own post.
2. Words have concrete and metaphorical meanings at all times, that is the
nature of language, this is how language was constructed over the millennia.
It is based on the fact that the word occupies an intermediate position
between perception and imagination. It is based on the pictorial function
of imagination. Words depict in images. They are carriers of images from
speaker to listener. Therefore, a word has the evocative power of creating
in the mind of the listener the images that the speaker tried to convey.
Plato called imagination the painter: zographos.
3. Words serve various communicative purposes (reports, descriptions, commands,
implorations) and are concrete, or ostensive, denotations and metaphorical
connotations of things and images. In your own post, the statement 'messages
are containers for entities' is already metaphorical, to wit: a message
is not a bucket, it is a collection of words and sentences that are the
'content' of the letter, note, post, but are not exactly like a quantity
of water in a bucket. Similarly, the concrete meaning of table, a flat board
on four legs, gives rise, via the image of the table top, to the metaphorical
notion of the table of contents of a book, or the organization table of
an institution. You might say that the metaphorical image then becomes an
ostensive definition in its own right.
4. The concrete meaning of 'metaphor' in Greek is: bearing, carrying from
one place to another (compare: Christoph, Christophoros, he who carries
Christ on his back). In Athens taxis are called 'metaphora': you take a
metaphora to go from your hotel to the Acropolis. In language metaphor carries
a meaning from one realm to another, from the concrete meaning of the word
to its extended uses, on loan, so to speak, in order to make a meaning sensuously
present, i.e., to represent something sensuously, graphically, and pictorially
in the mind of the listener. In Latin metaphor is rendered by the word Translation:
trans, across, latum, past participle of ferre, to carry, same as in 'transportation'
and 'transfer'.
This is precisely rendered by the German words '_bersetzung': to move from
one language to another.
5. Now I must vigorously reject -- no offense meant, it is my profession,
that's how I pay my bills -- any notion that dream interpretation serves
the psychoanalyst who merely exploits the method of dreams 'for his interpretive'
work. No, Klaus, that won't wash. Freud did suffer from some delusions,
but this was not one of them.
Everybody, including thee and me, is a native dreamer. Mankind has been
dreaming since times immemorial. Dream interpreters, of their own and other
people's dreams, have flourished since times immemorial. The dream is a
naturally occurring metaphor because, as Freud put it, it translates, transforms,
one psychic content into another, specifically, the latent into the manifest
content of the dream. This act of transformation Freud called Traumarbeit,
or dream work, a method of encoding, or encrypting one message by another.
I called this whole realm THE TRANSFORMATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE DREAM AND
SYMPTOM. In Freud's original conception, the so-called mental symptom is
constructed like a dream, this requires a separate exposition.
The method to decode the encrypted dream content was the reversal of the
process, i.e., Analysenarbeit, or analysis-work: by suspending critical
and goal-directed thought, by relaxing the watchful censor at the gates
of Reason (as Schiller put it), by allowing seemingly random (but actually
determined) thoughts to come to consciousness (freie Einf_lle, actually,
free-but-really-unfree associations), the dreamer himself was led to the
threads connecting the manifest content to the latent content and to the
solution of the enigma of the dream. That's why Freud's Copernican revolution
was: the meaning of the dream is in the dreamer, NOT in the mind of the
interpreter. Anyone who thinks that he or she is an authority on someone
else's dreams is not an analyst.
6. Therefore: the source domain (if I understood your terms correctly) is
the dreamer who in his dreams, as I said, recreates his life pains and delights
for his own use. The target domain is the person to whom the dream is told.
Therefore: I have emphasized the following, already there in Freud's formulation:
since the dream is told to a listener, an added meaning is embedded in the
act of telling the dream. From there we come to the concept of 'transference':
_bertragung, the emotional attitudes carried, transferred from one person
to another. It so happens that in German the word _bertragung means: translation,
transference, and metaphor. I made this discovery when preparing to give
a lecture to an analytic group in G÷ttingen in 1986.
7. This leads me to the final point: the meaning of the dream and the symptom
is in the act of communication from speaker or actor to an audience, the
listener or the spectator: thus, the meaning of the dream, the gesture,
the 'symptom' is two-fold. Every monologue is potentially a dialogue, every
dream is thus a message to oneself and to another, as I explicate in my
paper, 'Freud and the interpersonal'.
I hope I was able to offer some explication of my previous very condensed
message.
Zvi Lothane
----------------------------------
Klaus Krippendorff :
<8>
i am afraid you didn't quite understand the distinctions i was drawing re.
metaphor. as far as i am concerned, i do not wish to generalize the word
metaphor to subsume translation, coding, communication from one to another,
speaking and writing, imagination, deciphering dreams, transportation, and
so on. these are phenomena from different empirical domains whose meanings
can be spelled out best in terms of these domains. for example, translation
from one language into another is subject to preservation of some criterion,
for example, in abstract/objectivist theories of language, it is truth.
this has nothing to do with languaging (interpersonally communicating within
a language), or dream interpretation (psychoanalysts' rearticulation of
the dreams told by a patient -- i do not wish to imply deviousness or exploitation
of patients although this can happen too). these are simply different phenoma
whose understanding are not served by mushing them into one category.
-----------------------------------
Metaphors, Universal Transfer, and Traumdeutung.
by Paul Jones.
<9>
I have been a little surprised by that serious reaction on my brief note
intended to merely mark my return to active life after a period of forced
silence. This makes me hope that the problem of epistemological hierarchy
is of importance for the science of consciousness and its applications.
I agree with Klaus Krippendorff that we should not generalise the word 'metaphor'
to any act of conceptual transfer at all. No doubt, etymology may influence
one's understanding of the other's text, but this is in no way the principal
feature of verbal communication, which is primarily characterised by the
portability of meanings related to the commonality of activities. Let us
note that adopting words from the foreign languages normally serves to convey
something special that cannot be merely translated. In particular, the word
'metaphor' can hardly be considered a mere substitute for 'transfer'---
in the modern usage, it rather refers to a specific way of transfer typical
of the arts, and poetry first of all. (I realise that this may not hold
for some languages like German, where the specific meaning of poetical metaphor
has to be conveyed with the contextual means).
<10>
On the other hand, I must admit that Zvi Lothane is right to stress the
universal importance of transfer processes in human behaviour and reasoning,
including 'internal' activity. I could even assert that the _universality_
of binding things together is the determinative feature of a conscious being,
distinguishing it from the animal, or an inanimate thing. However, this
universal transfer takes specific forms in every particular activity, and
we have to describe these individual forms along with their subjection to
the general scheme.
<11>
In my first comment on metaphors, I referred to the levels of art, science
and philosophy---but this does not mean that all the human life is either
art, or science, or philosophy, and there is nothing else in it. There are
other levels, both below and above, implying the appropriate forms of transfer,
with the general ordering from syncretism, through analyticity, to synthesis.
Metaphor in the proper sense (poetical metaphor) is syncretic: it melds
(using Zvi Lothane's word) the three levels distinct in science: description,
explanation, modelling---on the higher level (in philosophy), interpretations
synthesise all the three in a way quite different from the syncretic mixture
of a metaphor. However, on a lower level, in our everyday life, we find
various forms of _activity transfer_ which are much more syncretic as compared
to poetical metaphor, since they do not involve the recognition of the very
fact of transfer, while a poet's metaphor is intentional and conscious,
and its 'domains' (the term suggested by Klaus Krippendorff) are deliberately
linked rather than randomly mixed. In the same way, using words 'metaphorically'
is different from meaning transfer so frequent in the language: the former
_suggests_ a link between different domains, while the latter is a _manifestation_
of an activity transfer that has already occurred.
<12>
With all that in the mind, we could treat dreams as one of the most primitive
(that is, the most ancient and syncretic) forms of activity transfer, common
to humans and higher animals. The primitiveness of a dream makes it also
a good starting point for further creative work, providing something to
analyse.
This is where a psychoanalyst steps in. Normally, people do not pay much
attention to their dreams---and this is quite understandable, since they
usually have much more advanced (and more efficient) means of coping with
the world (including themselves), and there is no need to watch a clepsydra,
with a good wristwatch on the wrist. However, in certain cases, higher-level
mechanisms may loose their efficiency, which is usually an indicator of
social inappropriateness. Still, the people continue to manipulate the broken
gears unaware of their loose movement. Psychotherapy is to help people to
grasp something solid instead of emptiness, and reconstruct the hierarchy
of self-control in a way more adequate in the new circumstances. However,
as Freud stressed, it is the patient who has to do the work, not the analyst;
the role of the latter is to provide a professional feedback, an active
environment enhancing the patient's own reflective abilities.
<13>
In principle, a therapist can work with any pieces of personal experience,
dreams being one possible component. Good therapists combine various techniques
and use every known theory to achieve optimal treatment in each case. To
select the appropriate means, they have to interpret the patient's behaviour,
including external activity as well as dreams. Still, lack of professionalism
may lead to strained interpretations and suggestion, negatively influencing
the whole processes of rehabilitation. Quite often the therapist's errors
originate from the same social imperfections as the patient's troubles,
which results in a complex interference pattern.
<14>
It should be stressed that the patient's internal processes and his/her
involvement in therapy are the different levels of the same hierarchy, and
the whole therapeutic process can be considered as internal to the collective
subject comprising both the patient and the therapist, in the context of
their social position, that is, their embedding into a higher-level totality.
The interaction between the participants of psychotherapy may hence be treated
as just another case of transfer, on the group level. This transfer may
be as hierarchical as in the individual case, involving activity transfer,
metaphors, analysis and synthesis etc. A clear understanding of transfer
processes involved is of ultimate importance for correct interpretation
and efficient feedback in psychotherapy.
P.Jones
--------------------------------
Zvi Lothane :
<15>
it is my turn to question what you refer to as abstract/objectivist theories
of language. Sounds very learned but somehow lifeless to me. It also seems
to imply that said theories are more 'objective' than the 'subjective' goings
on in psychoanalysis. But having practiced the art for more than 30 years
I can declare that dreams, hallucinations, and delusions possess the highest
degree of reality, psychological reality, that is, which is the foundation
of the science of mind built up by means of the psychoanalytic method.
At any rate, I believe a lot of havoc and mischief in psychology and philosophy
has been created by the mushing of the words 'objective' and 'subjective'.
Thus I am hard put to see where any 'mushing' as you say, takes place, in
my discussion of the role of metaphor, or as Ricoeur said, 'la metaphore
vive'.'
Zvi Lothane
----------------------------------
Mariela Szirko
To Drs. Lothane & Krippendorff
<16>
While I personally had no problem in directly receiving unrecorded mails
of our open forum, and in the particular case of your exchange I certainly
enjoyed it, I feel that I should find a way of providing you with certain
notice without preempting any superegoic stance or abashing your welcome
future participation. Of course any of us can use in that way the forum,
but it carries a measure of disorder and of ephemerality that could easily
elope from any bound. We share our permanently-recorded forum with some
rather high-level academic officers and the restriction to a short number
of bits per week is what many of us feel that kept them hearing us at all.
<17>
Most of the academic people that receives many messages per day will probably
unsubscribe if invited to read too much, in particular mails not containing
some sort of public articles (even if addressed personally, as it became
customary in our Forum).
Thus probably it is the best to await Herbert's comeback in order to inquiry
for a consensus on this class of use of the Forum. Please allow me to say
this as a personal impression, in no way putting any hinderance on your
election of the mode of participation. Anyway, if a majority chooses it,
I chance to have access to a void, open mail list. It is
Urubiociencias@seciu.edu.uy
and it would be easy to charge on the whole KJF list for our personal exchanges
there, and then leave to everybody's decision to unsubscribe or stay. I
repeat that I enjoyed your exchanges, so in such a case I would remain on
Urubiociencias; but I am afraid that our correspondants in the highest offices
will leave our permanent-recorded Forum if this use (even though it does
not file a permanent record in the McGill University's web site) of KJF
becomes common.
<18>
On the metaphor's issue, I would have something to say on my part, focusing
in that the issue centers on the ontic-ontological status of relations.
If one deems it self-subsisting, with Pythagoras-Parmenides-Plato-Poinsot
tradition, then one may build a semiotics that puts the logos before the
being, the 'Son' before the 'Father', Zeus maiming Chronos, and the ultimate
consistency of any 'being' in its being a predication; this is the stance
which I find you both have chosen, and which, as hitherto undiscussed in
your correspondence, seems me adopted while as yet not completely analized.
There are other positions, among them the one directly opposite to your
outlined stance. I mentioned some of this in my posted notes, in particular
in the last one (undistributed yet already posted) on Frieden's ideas.
But I have no time to further discuss it by mail, so I should leave the
outline here and hope to see your next exchanges.
Please disable your Outlook command to send it as .htm, since your mails
are received innecessarily duplicated.
Yours cordially,
Prof. Mariela Szirko,
<postmaster@neubio.gov.ar>
----------------------------------
Zvi Lothane :
Dear Prof. Szirko,
<19>
I apologize if I transgressed again: but I read your post AFTER I had already
responded to Klaus Krippendorff. Let me explain, in my defense, that it
was Klaus who first sent me an unencoded message and since I didn't know
any better, I just responded. I do not know how Klaus slipped through the
net and managed to get an unencoded message out.
Anyway, from now on I'll abstain until Herbert returns.
Un abrazo,
Lothane
-----------------------------------
Zvi Lothane :
<20>
I do not quite understand whether you mean 'transfer' concretely, like transferring
from one language to another. This was what I was writing about: the idea
of 'translation' as explanatory of the structure of the metaphor is itself
a metaphor. Rather: a metaphor is constructed by an act of 'transposition',
a kind of 'translation', but on Freud's terms it relates to the same idea
or concept expressed in primary vs. secondary process, or latent content
in the manifest content of the dream. This is not a translation in the literal
sense, because translation is a laborious conscious activity, whereas the
construction of the dream as metaphor in the state of sleep is an unconscious
process which Freud called the dream work.
<21>
The various dynamics of the dream work are displacement, dramatization,
which I prefer to call pictorial, or imagic, thinking, condensation, substitution,
and secondary redaction (or elaboration). The key dynamism is displacement,
or Verschiebung, the essential phenomenon is the 'transposition' or 'translocation'
from one realm of observation to another, so that it includes substitution,
and condensation just adds the idea that one content can have a number of
references. The other is the imagic depiction of the content, the 'dream
hieroglyphics', as it were, such that imageless thought is transformed into
imagic representation, or depiction. Secondary elaboration or redaction
puts it all into a more or less coherent whole that can be told to a listener.
<22>
I agree with Paul that dream metaphors are inherently related to poetic
metaphors, tropes, and figures of speech. Poetics, however, as in Plato,
Dante, Shelley, and Wordsworth, participate importantly in philosophical
discourse. Therefore Paul's distinction between a hierarchy of metaphors.
But here is an essential difference between the dreamer's and the poet's
metaphorical activity: the poet consciously uses the metaphors and symbols
shared by a language usage group, whereas the dreamer constructs his metaphors
in a private meaning universe of his own. Here the Copernican discovery
of Freud was that you cannot decipher, decode a dream according to the 'Egyptian
method', or a universal dream key -- in order to help the dreamer analyze
his own dream there was need for him to apply the method of free association,
a technique Freud put on the map.
Zvi Lothane
----------------------------------
<23>
Paul Jones :
Zvi Lothane wrote on Dec 28, 1999:
'I do not quite understand whether you mean 'transfer' concretely, like
transferring from one language to another.'
There are many synonyms for transfer: translation, transposition, translocation,
transportation,...association, substitution, ... generalization, ... metaphor.
That is why I prefer to use the noun 'transfer' generically, with all the
other synonyms indicating the particular kinds of transfer. As far as I
can guess, Zvi uses a different word ('metaphor') in a similar generic sense,
while I prefer (as a poet and a specialist in aesthetics) to restrict the
realm of the metaphor to the arts.
<24>
In my opinion, any instance of transfer (that is, involving the components
of some activity in another activity) can be explained by the same fundamental
mechanism, which yet remains to be properly described; in brief, it is related
to the (objective) possibility of substituting one person for another in
making something together, which is reflected in every individual as the
ability to mentally put oneself in the other's place, and in particular
to mentally try different schemes of behavior. Any transfer can only occur
through external things regarded as the products of some activity; in particular,
there is a phenomenon like the (essentially human) attitude to one's own
body (or its parts) as a (collective) product, which is reflected by primitive
humans in the idea of the person's social potential related to the biological
factors (racism, sexism, kinship, innate nobility, etc.).
<25>
Though some kinds of transfer may be unconscious, they can always be brought
to consciousness through an appropriate rearrangement of activity. However,
there are two kinds of the unconscious, related either to what once was
conscious but has been pushed into the background by the more recent experiences,
or to what has not yet been made conscious; I refer to these domains as
the subconscious and the super-conscious respectively; since they admit
different kinds of transfer processes, they should be differently treated
in therapy. In particular one has to distinguish the components of the dreams
coming from the different levels of the unconscious; since there are also
conscious components, one can control dream work to certain extent (especially
after special training), and be able to convey dreams to the others.
<26>
That is, dreams are hierarchical, as any other activity, and it is the refoldability
of hierarchies that allows to use dreams in psychotherapy, self-regulation,
creative work. However, there may be many levels in a dream beyond substitution
and redaction (as described by Z.L.). The analyst has to initiate unfolding
of these levels one by one, according to their internal organization; this
may produce the impression of inconsistency and arbitrary multiple interpretations---the
examples are abundant in the literature---however, a correct analysis only
follows the logic of transfer incorporated in the dream itself.
<27>
'I agree with Paul that dream metaphors are inherently related to poetic
metaphors, tropes, and figures of speech. Poetics, however, as in Plato,
Dante, Shelley, and Wordsworth, participate importantly in philosophical
discourse. Therefore Paul's distinction between a hierarchy of metaphors.'
Transfer processes in a dream are related to poetical metaphors no more
than any other kind of transfer (e.g. substituting one mathematical expression
into another, or using a newspaper for a plate. It is important to distinguish
the different faces of the same person in every single act: thus, a poet
can try to express certain philosophical ideas in the poem, but he/she will
remain a poet only in respect to the aesthetic product he/she creates, while
the philosophical content proper makes him/her a kind of philosopher obeying
the laws of that level. There are numerous examples of how a god poet played
a poor philosopher, spoiling the work of art by irrelevant intrusions. The
same holds for many physicists trying to treat philosophical problems on
the basis of their scientific experience --- one such example was discussed
on the KJF recently.
<28>
But here is an essential difference between the dreamer's and the poet's
metaphorical activity: the poet consciously uses the metaphors and symbols
shared by a language usage group, whereas the dreamer constructs his metaphors
in a private meaning universe of his own.
That is why I would not call dream work a 'metaphorical activity', rather
designating it with a special term (e.g. 'dream work'). In either case,
one activity is modeled within another --- but the forms are different,
as well as the ways of entering the social life.
'Here the Copernican discovery of Freud was that you cannot decipher, decode
a dream according to the 'Egyptian method', or a universal dream key --
in order to help the dreamer analyze his own dream there was need for him
to apply the method of free association, a technique Freud put on the map.'
<29>
This was a really great discovery implying that there cannot be a psychological
study without the psychologist's interference. Without human communication,
one cannot get access to the psychological features proper, remaining on
some other level of research. This perfectly matched the discovery of quantum
physics about the same time. Freud's discovery, I suppose, was even more
valuable, since he also indicated that this essential interference does
not prevent us from designing consistently objective methods and it is the
ways of their application only that depend on the particular case of interference.
P.Jones
-----------------------------------
Klaus Krippendorff
<30>
'Dear Klaus (you can address me by my first name, too, it's shorter), it
is my turn to question what you refer to as abstract/objectivist theories
of language. Sounds very learned but somehow lifeless to me.'
zvi,
the category comes from v. n. volosinov (marxism and the philosophy of language,
1986). the conception of language of saussure and much of linguistics after
that is abstract/objectivist. i find it useful to draw distinctions like
this when one wants to speak of what language does.
It also seems to imply that said theories are more 'objective' than the
'subjective' goings on in psychoanalysis.
theories are the result of observers facing an object to be predicted. even
the word comes from being a spectator, a detached describers of phenomena,
not a practitioner who intends to intervene and design something new.
But having practiced the art for more than 30 years I can declare that dreams,
hallucinations, and delusions possess the highest degree of reality, psychological
reality, that is, which is the foundation of the science of mind built up
by means of the psychoanalytic method.
<31>
'At any rate, I believe a lot of havoc and mischief in psychology and philosophy
has been created by the mushing of the words 'objective' and 'subjective'.
'subjective' is not the only oppositions to 'objective'. the one i prefer
is 'constructed', which does not need to be subjective or difficult to verify.
it merely suggest that what we talk of does not exist independent of its
observer/analyst/designer.
Klaus Krippendorff
---------------------------------