Metaphors: Part One (Article)

Metaphors: Part One by sleepingirl

Metaphors are an oft-discussed part of language. They are an important device in creative writing, and we often talk about how they can fall under the category of Ericksonian techniques in hypnosis. We might think about using different metaphors to induce trance, and the way that people process them hypnotically. But it is just as hypnotically useful to explore how they function in our communication and lives and how that affects the way that we employ them.

Metaphor in Language and Stories

A metaphor in the sense that we are most familiar with is at its basis using language to compare one thing to another. We see this a lot in poetry or other writing -- “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?” We’re taught in school that a metaphor is when we associate two concepts by directly stating it -- not using the words “like” or “as”, which would make it a simile. But for the purpose of discussing here, this distinction is not really important. We can consider anything metaphorical as long as it attempts to show a relationship between two things.

We also understand that a metaphor is not constrained to something that occurs in written or spoken language. In media and stories, we recognize different kinds of symbolism as metaphorical. For example, many of Aesop’s fables contain fictional characters and situations that were meant to metaphorically represent real life. In this case we might also call them allegorical.

Why do we use metaphors? It can be to make one concept more clear by relating it to another concept that might be more well-understood. But it is not just about clarity. It is also about expanding our perception of an initial idea so that we have more ways to consider it; it ends up changing the way we view something. For example, the bossa nova jazz standard “Água de Beber” by Antonio Carlos Jobim opens with the lyrical metaphor “Your love’s the rain / My heart, the flower”. We poetically view and make connections about this because we can consider the many associations of the relationship between rain and a flower versus the love within a partnership, beginning perhaps with just the qualities of a flower itself: a flower blooms, a flower is beautiful, a flower can die if not cared for, flowers are bountiful and naturalistic (or the opposite -- rare and cultivated). Each person may make different associations depending on the way they think about both concepts, and the person relating these concepts now has an increased breadth of resources with which to describe both of them.

Metaphors can also be more than a static comparison -- they can be dynamic and in motion. In The Brainwashing Book, we discussed this idea of dynamic metaphors and how they serve to move in parallel to a story. In “Água de Beber”, a story is told based on its singular metaphor simply by exploring in this fashion. The natural understanding of rain versus a flower is that it is necessary; thus “Will it wither and fade / Or bloom to the sky?” In this way, the reader or listener already has a framework to understand the trajectory of the base concept as soon as they hear the flower metaphor, which can be useful for the storyteller; they can rely on the familiarity or even use it as misdirection.

Conceptual Metaphor

Even before getting into discussion of metaphors as an explicitly hypnotic tool, we can talk about how they are useful in our hypnotic practice by discussing them beyond their usual literary use. Metaphors are not just a way that we consciously attempt to associate things -- they are baked into our culture and language and are a major function of how we think and communicate.

“Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson posits this thesis: We process and represent the world through concepts that we necessarily have to relate to other concepts. We don’t just do this through language exclusively, it’s how our brains work. They say: “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

What is meant by this? If we try to think of the way that we process the world, we have certain experiences and artifacts that are very concrete and familiar to us. This could be the product of our personal histories, a function of the way we interact with the world, or part of our cultural understanding. We also deal with a lot of concepts that are more abstract -- largely, plenty of the things that we experience have some level of solidness and some level of abstraction. We can consider the way that we think about all the things that we encounter as a form of us comparing and relating them to other concepts -- sometimes as a form of discovery, and other times as simply a “given” in the way that we process them linguistically or cognitively.

For example, the book leads with discussing the nature of argument as relating to war. Thinking of an argument between people as a “fight” is a familiar metaphor to us, and it’s one that is naturally part of our language. We can see this in the words we use about it -- we “win” or “lose”; we “attack” or “defend”  or “shoot down” positions. But it’s not just that we use those words as part of the metaphor -- we necessarily relate the concept of argument to war in order to functionally understand what an argument is or how it works. The two ideas are fundamentally entwined.

We can hypothesize about why this might be -- historical humans would have known physical violence before they knew verbal arguments, so it could make sense that as our language and behavior evolved, it did so based on our existing culture, and those two “domains” are mapped together. These kinds of conceptual metaphors, where we naturally associate ideas, are heavily dependent on this kind of cultural foundation, both as a whole as well as someone’s individual history and experiences. Even going back to the jazz lyrics of “Água de Beber”, we can recognize that the metaphor of “love” and a “flower” is a deeply ingrained relationship in our culture -- one that the song to some degree relies on to tell its story.

Different Types of Metaphors

There are plenty of these kinds of metaphors embedded in our language and social consciousness, many of which we don’t even consciously think about. Here are a few different forms these can take:

• Structural metaphors
  • A concept is structured to be like another concept. A structural metaphor implies that the first concept has similar qualities to the second concept; they function similarly or serve a similar purpose. This is evident both in the way that we think about both of them as well as within the language we use.
  • Argument is war: “winning” or “losing”, “attacking” or “defending”, “fighting”
  • Time is money: it is a “valuable” resource, “wasting” or “spending”, “costing” or “worth” time
• Orientational metaphors
  • A concept is given a spacial orientation. These metaphors often have to do with the way that our physical bodies interact with the world and our kinesthetic experience with different concepts and actions. They are usually inherent or assumed and like all conceptual metaphors can vary culture to culture.
  • Happy is up: feeling “down”, “high” spirits, being “low”
  • Future/progress is forward: “ahead”, “coming up”, moving “backward”
  • Status is up: “higher” status, “lower” in rank
• Ontological metaphors
  • A concept that does not have substance is given substance. Compare this with the NLP idea of “nominalization” -- a noun or thing that does not have physical, quantifiable qualities. We use ontological metaphors in order to make these “things” more tangible and understandable, and we often use different comparisons for the same concept to represent or describe different qualities.
  • The mind is a machine: just not “working”, the “gears are spinning”, “programming” someone
  • The mind is a brittle object: “breaking” someone’s mind, “fragile” thoughts
• Boundary metaphors
  • A concept is described to have boundaries. Many of the concepts we deal with do not have concrete bounds, only the arbitrary definitions we ascribe to them. Still, we often describe our relation to these things in terms of their boundaries. Sometimes we can consider this as a “container” metaphor, when there is an “inside” and “outside.” This has some interesting connections with Gestalt therapy, which is all about the boundaries between different concepts.
  • An activity has a boundary: “before”, “after”, “during”
  • The forest has a boundary: “outside” or “inside”, “within”
  • Trance has a boundary: going “into” trance, “entering”, coming “out of” trance
• Personification metaphors
  • An object or concept is given human qualities. This is a particularly common habit of ours, seen in many of our figures of speech.
  • A book is a person: the book “told” me, it “explains” something
  • A computer is a person: my computer is “dying”, it “doesn’t like” when I try to stream and play Overwatch at the same time
• Metonymy
  • An entity is referred to as another entity. This is not strictly the same process as a metaphor, but it is related -- it is what happens when one object or concept is used as a “stand-in” for the other.
  • The part is the whole: they’re such a “pretty face”
  • The creator is the works: I enjoy reading “sleepingirl”
  • The place is the people: “the class” said that hypnosis is hot

Metaphor in Hypnosis

Extrapolating from this idea, let’s think about how we can apply this to hypnosis. Effective suggestion could be said to be about creating connections between concepts and ideas, some of which are integral to the subject’s worldview and some of which are introduced to them by the hypnotist. These connections we make rely on the existing associations in someone’s brain from their personal history and culture; they rely on our metaphorical representations.

We all have a lot of cultural metaphors that relate to hypnosis. One of the most ubiquitous is the connection between the orientation of “down” and “hypnosis”. This might come from our cultural understanding that “unconsciousness” equals “down” -- we literally orient our bodies down to go to sleep and up when we awaken. (“Waking up” or “deep sleep”, for example.) In hypnosis, we use this metaphor all the time -- the very ideas of depth, sinking, counting down, touch that moves downwards in kinesthetic inductions. We have a very distinct sense in our bodies that feels like heaviness or gravity when we go to sleep, which our cultural understanding of hypnosis is very much tied to. There is a fascinating rabbit-hole we could go down about the history of hypnosis versus all of the cultural associations we have with it.

Consider this in contrast to the way that we sometimes shift this -- sometimes we use ideas like “floating” or “flying” to describe hypnotic feelings and response. This may seem counter to our metaphorical idea that trance = down (although it’s important to remember that it is neither exclusive nor universal), but when it’s being applied effectively, what’s happening is that the subject is buying into a new metaphor and creating new associations. When we make a suggestion like this, we need to put a little more texture into the metaphor so that the connection is clear. Instead of simply saying “You might feel like you’re floating,” in a vacuum, we can introduce the metaphor so it is colorful and approachable: “Sometimes trance feels like a weighty thing, but other times it can feel like weightlessness, as though the trance itself has disconnected the feeling from your body, and your consciousness ends up floating in this vast, liquid sort of space…”

In this particular example, we begin with an acknowledgment of the accepted metaphor of “down” (which we might consider pacing) and then end up giving the listener a different metaphor (the orientation of “up”) through use of language that is meaningful, descriptive, and easy to connect to. Notice that part of what we are doing here is taking a fairly abstract idea -- “trance” -- and attempting to make it more concrete by relating it to concepts that are more easily understood. We end up in something of what we might consider a sweet spot for hypnosis -- partially abstract still, but with enough purchase for the subject to have something to hold on to. You can think of this as relating to the idea of ambiguity and suggestion as a whole.

Compound and Connecting Metaphors in Hypnosis

A good hypnosis scene flows naturally in a way where the transitions between moments and concepts are smooth. This is an exciting and rich topic, but we can examine an aspect of this from the lens of metaphor.

When we look at something as metaphorical, it naturally creates the possibility for other metaphorical connections. A simplistic comparison we might use in trance could be “Your brain feels fuzzy.” Perhaps this is just a natural part of our patter, as it’s a common turn of phrase we use in hypnosis play, but we can think of the different metaphors that could be in use here. What other things have the quality of being fuzzy -- are you making some kind of indirect comparison? A soft blanket? A TV screen? Someone’s vision when they are drunk or under the influence of drugs? A cat? If you were to go through with one of those metaphors in your language, what opportunities would that afford you in terms of the direction of the scene? If you said, “Your brain is fuzzy, as though someone’s put an obscuring lens over it and you can’t quite make your thoughts out anymore,” this gives the suggestion a frame of reference, and allows you to extrapolate: “And just like that lens is over your mind, you find it covers your other senses too as your hearing dulls, your vision blurs…” And then you are met with even more opportunities and paths to branch out from.

This is one way to learn how to develop good strategies for scene flow. You can also do this in the opposite direction -- if you have something particular you want to get to or achieve in a hypnotic scene, you can use that as the focal point and think of the qualities that it has to use them as stepping stones to get there. For example, in a bimbofication scene, what qualities are involved in the kind of play you’re looking for? Transformation? Intelligence draining? Consensual misogyny? An element of time? What kinds of concepts could you relate to these? What kinds of qualities do you want to emphasize? A person turning into a bimbo could be like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, and then perhaps you could go with the literal idea of metamorphosis where the person’s physical body changes shape while they are encased in some sort of cocoon or mummification. They do not have to be poetic metaphors -- you could think of this as similar to the NLP idea of “chunking” where we consider concepts that are in similar classes.

Metaphors are Faulty

One final thing to consider when we’re talking about any kind of comparison is the fact that when we are attempting to relate two different concepts, information will necessarily have to be lost or transformed. While metaphors can be very helpful for fleshing out abstract ideas or creating a different perspective, they don’t tell the whole or most accurate story about what you are trying to communicate.

For example, we can see a very vivid picture of this when we discuss the cultural metaphor of trance as a “container” -- having a distinct “inside” and “outside”. Experienced hypnokinksters will understand that the nature of trance is much more subtle than this, and that the actual boundary of hypnosis is often quite blurred; a subject may be “in trance” much earlier than either person realizes it, and they may not be “out of trance” when they are woken up, or even that the idea of “in or out” of trance doesn’t have any practical bearing on the kinds of play we want to do. For another example, some hypnokinksters may take the metaphor of the “mind as machine” too literally and be confused when they or others take suggestions in more nuanced ways than simple input and output.

Metaphors are an extremely useful tool when we are trying to broaden our understanding of something and in fact quite necessary especially when we are dealing in abstracts. However, it’s always important to keep in mind that while they are expansive, they can either sometimes expand in the wrong direction or serve to limit our perspective instead. It’s good practice to be flexible in the way that we associate and relate concepts, both for ourselves as hypnotists as well as communicating and practicing this with our partners. Remember that different metaphors serve different purposes and highlight different qualities, so using different ways to compare the same things can be helpful.

In Conclusion

This is a brief outline of the idea of conceptual metaphor that can assist us when we’re trying to effectively understand the way our partners think -- after all, knowing how someone processes is an important step to doing good hypnosis. Hopefully this gives a bit to think about in terms of the way that we connect ideas as hypnotists and our partners connect ideas as subjects. We should consider the kinds of things that are a part of our linguistic culture and use them to our advantage, and strive to create colorful and vivid patter that people can easily hook into.

Author’s note

You can find my favorite version of “Água de Beber” here, albeit not with English lyrics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaD5bv8kQE8

Bibliography

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2017). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.