ANALYSIS OF METAPHOR:
Methodology for the Psychological
Interpretation of Culture

By Richard Koenigsberg

Online Publication Date: 27-May-2008.

I. IDEOLOGY AND METAPHOR

Ideologies contain and articulate psychological meanings. How is it possible to decipher the latent content of ideological texts? I have developed a method, “analysis of metaphor,” that consists of identifying recurring images and metaphors within writings and speeches of individuals who have been significant in defining an ideology and bringing it forth onto the public stage.     

Identification of recurring metaphors and images contained within the rhetoric of political leaders reveals the fantasies that the ideology seeks to express. An ideology functions as a modus operandi to structure and externalize fantasies shared by a group. Identification of recurring metaphors and images allows one to perceive the nature and shape of fantasies contained in an ideological text.

Within a given ideology, certain words or terms become salient—pregnant with meaning. In the case of Nazism, the central terms were “Germany,” “the people” and “the Jew.” Condensed within each of these terms were the fantasies upon which Nazi ideology was constructed. Ideologies exist as elements of culture in order to allow members of a society to externalize and act out shared fantasies.

Ideology is like manifest content of a dream that many people are having at once. Recurring images and metaphors allow us to ascertain the latent meaning of the ideology. The psychological study of culture focuses not on the idiosyncrasies of individuals, but upon how shared desires, fantasies, anxieties and conflicts give rise to collective representations. We seek to reveal the sources and meanings of belief-systems that constitute a given societal group.

Ideologies exist as cultural and linguistic forms within societies. But culture and language do not explain the existence of the ideology. An ideology exists as an element or dimension of culture because it functions to allow desires and fantasies to become articulated as social reality. The cultural form constitutes a modus operandi.

II. CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

The theories of George Lakoff and Mark L. Johnson have become highly influential in the field of cognitive psychology.  According to the concept of “metaphorical mapping,” slots in a “source domain schema” get mapped into slots in a “target domain,” shaping our perceptions within this domain. Target domains are abstract, conceptual domains, whereas source domains are familiar ones, most often in the physical world.

Johnson in The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (1990) writes about “imaginative projection,” a principle by which the body (i.e., physical experience and its structures) works its way up into the mind (i.e., mental operations). Metaphors in speech and text convey the presence of the body within the mind. According to Lakoff and Johnson, structures of embodied experience generate “conceptual metaphors.”

The method, “analysis of metaphor,” grows out of my research on Hitler and Nazism, presented in my book Hitler’s Ideology: Embodied Metaphor, Fantasy and History (2007) and in online publications such as “Ideology, Perception and Genocide” and “Genocide as Immunology” Based on the identification of recurring images and metaphors within the rhetoric of Hitler and other Nazis, I conclude that Nazi ideology was defined, supported and sustained by a coherent fantasy, specifically by the fantasy of Germany as an enormous body politic suffering from a potentially fatal disease.

Hitler’s entire world view—his perception of reality—grew out of his belief that Germany was a body and Jews pathogenic organisms. Hitler’s writings and speeches are replete with images and metaphors that convey this fantasy. The Final Solution represented the acting out of an immunological fantasy. Hitler and the Nazis sought to destroy Jews—imagined to be the source of Germany’s disease—in order to prevent the death of the body politic.

In Analogies of War (1992), Y. F. Khong points to the importance of studying the rhetoric of leaders and decision-makers in order to seek and find “systematic metaphors.” The repeated use of the same set of analogies over time allows one to be confident that metaphors within the rhetoric of political leaders are playing “truly a cognitive function.”

The metaphor that occurs most frequently in Hitler’s writings a speeches is that of Germany as a living organism. The Jew is depicted as bacteria, a virus, parasite and “force of disintegration” working to destroy the national organism. When one claims that metaphors within rhetoric play a cognitive function, one suggests that metaphors are used not simply to illustrate concepts, but rather that metaphors are the source of these concepts.

It is not that Hitler has a negative idea of the Jew and then attaches words like bacteria, parasite, etc. to this idea. Rather, Hitler’s conception of the Jew grows out of a certain kind of experience that causes Hitler to perceive the Jew in these terms. It is almost as if the symbolic object—“Jew”—is present within Hitler’s body. One may say that the Jew was Hitler’s psychosomatic symptom.

Hitler’s rhetoric demonstrates how a source domain (the human body) may become mapped onto a target domain (the body politic), shaping perception in this domain. In More Than Cool Reason (1989) (excerpt) Lakoff and Johnson observe that when a source domain gets mapped onto knowledge in a target domain, this allows us to draw inferences about this domain. Because Hitler projects the idea of a human body into the body politic, this permits him to infer that Germany suffering from a disease that requires diagnosis and cure.

According to Lakoff and Johnson, conceptual schemas organize our knowledge about or perception of reality. Our minds contain models about some aspect of the world that we use in comprehending our experience and reasoning about it. The central insight of conceptual metaphor theory is that schemas and cognitive models that organize our perceptions grow out of structures developed in relationship to our bodies. Johnson claims that bodily experiences and structures are projected into mental operations.

III. FANTASY AND THE EMBODIED MIND

The psychoanalytic concept of fantasy (or phantasy as it was spelled in the early rendering of this term) refers to an intermediate mental state existing on the borderline between body and mind. According to Freud, impulses and desires located within the body give rise to mental corollaries, i.e., fantasies, which represent the transformation of the impulse or desire into a form of ideation.

Mark Johnson claims bodily experience works its way into the mind through imaginative projection. Presenting Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory, Thomas Ogden states that fantasy “never loses its connection to the body.” Fantasy content is always ultimately traceable to thoughts and feelings about the “working and contents of one’s own body in relationship to the workings and contents of the body of the other.”

If ideologies articulate fantasies and fantasies derive from the body, it follows that ideologies are bound to—not separate from—our bodies. How may we understand the relationship between body, fantasy and mental operations in the case of ideology? Metaphors in a text, I suggest, convey the presence of the body and allow fantasies about the body to enter social reality.

It is by virtue of embodied metaphors that the body with its fantasies makes its way into discourse. The target domain (ideological rhetoric) comes to be conceived or structured according to a source domain (the body and its fantasies). At the level of language, entities, attributes and processes in the target domain (the body politic) are lexicalized using words and processes from the source domain (the human body).

Nazi ideology represented a fantasy that Germany was an organism suffering from a potentially fatal disease. This fantasy about the body was conveyed through the vehicle of images and metaphors that appear endlessly in ideological texts that the Nazis produced. The Nazis created culture and history based on a fantasy about the body projected into their ideology.

IV. PSYCHIC DETERMINISM

Freud’s principle of “psychic determinism” asserts that there is no such thing as a chance occurrence or randomness in the life of the mind. According to this principle, dreams, jokes, slips-of-the-tongue and psychosomatic symptoms possess psychological meaning. Dream images, for example, are strictly determined. They reflect the mind’s desire to bring forth thoughts from a state of unconsciousness into consciousness.

Unconscious thoughts and fantasies enter consciousness in other ways. A slip-of-the-tongue represents the breakthrough of a repressed idea. In the case of the psychosomatic symptom, an idea or fantasy makes its way into reality in the form of a bodily symptom. One may say that the body speaks through its symptoms: has a mind of its own.

Metaphors appearing within speech and texts do not exactly “break in” to consciousness. Rather, they are contained within ordinary patterns of language. Lakoff suggests that a community’s world-views are articulated through figurative language. Perhaps metaphors are the vehicles through which unconscious fantasies and desires make their way into everyday life.

According to this view, unconscious fantasies (about the body) continually enter into language and consciousness—through the vehicle of metaphor. Thus, there is no clear distinction between fantasy and ordinary mental operations. Ordinary mental operations are infused with fantasies about the body. Reality is constructed continually as metaphors bring the body and its fantasies into the external world. Ideologies allow fantasies to become shared, transforming impulses and desires into socially acceptable structures of thought.

Analysis of ideology is analogous to Freud’s interpretation of dreams. As dreams reveal the unconscious fantasies of individuals, so ideologies reveal fantasies shared by members of a group. Ideologies are like manifest content of a dream that many people are having at once. They constitute a modus operandi that allows shared fantasies to make their way into reality. To analyze an ideology is to interpret a collective dream.

V. THE HUMAN BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC

Nazi ideology represented a fantasy about the body externalized into the world. The reality that the Nazis constructed cannot be separated from bodily fantasy. If ideas about a target domain are derived from experiences in a source domain, it follows that ideas about bodies politic cannot be separated from the experience of our own body. People say that discourse shapes the body, but might we not also say that our bodies give rise to and structure discourse?

In the case of nationalism, the experience of one’s body is projected into the idea of a body politic. Often, the line of demarcation between the two—the human body and the body politic—blurs. When Rudolf Hess declares, “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler,” he implies that there is no separation between Hitler and Germany. Hitler’s small body has fused with the large body. Two have merged into one.

Hitler’s rhetoric about the German body politic contains a narrative about Hitler. When Hitler speaks about Germany as a body containing a disease, he also is speaking about his own body with a disease contained within it. The disease within the body politic symbolizes Hitler’s disease. What was the nature of Hitler’s disease that led him to devise the Final Solution as a means to kill the disease within the body politic?