Thus, Modell shows us how metaphoric thought enables us to move from situations and environments we know into those we don't. The essence of metaphor is that one thing stands for another. Since both verbal information and nonverbal perceptions can stand for, represent, or invoke other experiences, the metaphoric operation of mind can take place either way.
Modell discussed two types of cognitive metaphors: "frozen" metaphor and "fluid" metaphor. "Frozen" metaphors are "primitive and unambiguous." They can be caused by "intense emotional experiences," which act as "templates" that are then "involuntarily projected onto the current environment." "Fluid metaphors" are "ambiguous and involve the self in imaginative ways, leading to new ways of experiencing the world." "Frozen metaphors" are often at the basis of emotional illness, causing us to react to ordinary situations in the present as if they were traumatic situations from our past. "Fluid metaphors" are healthy and adaptive. This has crucial implications for understanding psychotherapy: "The transformation of frozen into fluid metaphors is what treatment is all about."
There is a clue here as to what is effective in psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy. It isn't that the study of formative experiences reveals dark secrets about buried events and urges, the avoidance of which has determined our lives, as Freud and others supposed. Rather, the study of formative experiences discloses the patterns of interpretation-the metaphoric templates-we continue to use to make sense of what happened to us, even after their usefulness has passed. Thus, psychotherapy provides the opportunity to become aware of these old patterns and consciously adapt them to conditions of our lives today.
The abundant contradictions and lack of coherence in Mark's descriptions of himself become more comprehensible when looked at in terms of a self as a process involving multiple metaphors, some of the most important of which are essentially "frozen." When he says, "You can be and you can't be," he means, among other things, that you can exist as a competent person and an incompetent person simultaneously. This means that Mark can never experience himself as a competent person without simultaneously experiencing himself as impaired. That this is a conflict within his self or identity is clear by his minimizing of his problem ("Hey, I've got this problem. It's no big deal"), and exaggeratedly bragging about his abilities ("I can ... do stuff you probably can't even think about"), while the clear import of his comments is that his learning disabilities have been of such magnitude in his life that they have largely determined the quality of it.
The experience of feeling as if he were lying "naked under the desk" has become a "frozen metaphor" for Mark, one which is evoked many times each day. As a child, he coped with it by "hiding," and he used several strategies to accomplish this, including not having a social life, cheating in school, and working twice as hard at schoolwork so that it would not only be correct in content but look correct in form. By the time of his interview with Carol, he was trying to be more authentically himself-trying not to "hide"but he still feels "naked" about his learning disability. Psychologically, he doesn't appear to have much sense of self or perspective on who he really is, beyond the endless struggle to cope. Now that he is out of school, he seems to be rather compulsively trying to substitute competence for weakness in every life domain. So his identity seems still to be driven by frozen metaphors of painful failure that he is trying to cope with by establishing mastery.
From the interview data, it would appear that Mark is not dealing with these issues in psychotherapy or any other way. Instead he is trying to conquer his profound sense of alienation ("Like I come from another planet ... I'm just as smart as them, but I'm not one of them") by becoming a master of various skills, but it won't work. Mark already knows that he's smart, but his achievements don't take away the feeling of always being on the edge of failure. In psychotherapy, Mark would be invited to explore how his formative experiences have come to determine the ways in which he sees himself and experiences his relationships. The combination of a deeper experience of self and a more objective perception of self would lead to the identification of oneself as fundamentally human, like everyone else, but with a personal, unique pattern of strengths and weaknesses. Thus, if psychotherapy were effective, it would help Mark both to be more comfortable within himself and to see himself as one among humanity instead of, as now, a man defined by his deficiencies, struggling to overcome them with skills.
Go to Mark's interview