Analysis of Metaphor: Method for the Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Culture

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. 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 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.

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Analysis of Metaphor: Method for the
Psychological Interpretation of Culture

CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS

The theories of George Lakoff and Mark L. Johnson have become highly influential. 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.

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" Hitler's world view—his perception of reality—grew out of his belief that Germany was a body and Jews pathogenic organisms. The Final Solution represented the acting out of an immunological fantasy as the Nazis sought to destroy the source of Germany's disease in order to prevent the death of the body politic.

Hitler's rhetoric demonstrates how a source domain (the human body) may become mapped onto a target domain (the body politic). In More Than Cool (1989), 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.

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FANTASY AND THE EMBODIED MIND

Mark Johnson claims that bodily experience works its way into the mind through imaginative projection. According to Melanie Klein, fantasy never loses its connection to the body. Fantasy content is 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. By virtue of embodied metaphors, 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).

PSYCHIC DETERMINISM

Metaphors 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. 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.

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.

THE HUMAN BODY AND THE BODY POLITIC

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?

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?