Analogy and Metaphor as Activators of Unconscious Association Patterns

The logic of an analogy can appeal to the conscious mind and break through some of its limiting sets. When analogy and metaphor also refer to deeply engrained associations, mental mechanisms, and learned patterns of behavior, they tend to activate these internal responses and make them available for problem solving. Suggestions made by analogy are thus a powerful and indirect twofold approach that mediates between the conscious and unconscious. Appropriate analogies appeal to the conscious mind because of their inherent interest while mobilizing the resources of the unconscious by many processes of association.

Analogy, puns, metaphor, paradox, and folk language can all be understood as presenting a general context on the surface level that is first assimilated by consciousness. The individual words and phrases used to articulate that general context, however, all have their own individual and literal associations that do not belong to the context. These individual and literal associations are, of course, usually suppressed and excluded from consciousness in its effort to grasp the general context. These suppressed associations do remain in the unconscious, however, and under the special circumstances of hypnotic trance, where dissociation and literalness are heightened, they can play a significant role in facilitating responsive behavior that is surprising to consciousness.

The adult reader is usually searching for an author's meaning. Within certain limits it really doesn't matter what particular sentences or words are used. Many different sentences and combinations of words could be used to express the same meaning. It is the meaning or the general context of the sentences that registered in consciousness, while the particular sentences and words used fall into the unconscious and are "forgotten." In the same way one "reads" the meaning of a whole word rather than the individual letters used to make up the word. The general context of the letters registers as the conscious meaning of a word rather than the individual associations of each letter.

The greatest hypnotist of all times, Milton Erickson, has devised a number of techniques to activate the individual, literal, and unconscious associations to words, phrases, or sentences buried within a more general context. Turns of phrase that are shocking, surprising, mystifying, non sequiturs, too difficult or incomprehensible for the general conscious context, for example, all tend momentarily to depotentiate the patient's conscious sets and to activate a search on the unconscious level that will turn up the literal and individual associations that were previously suppressed. When Erickson overloads the general context with many words, phrases, or sentences that have common individual associations, those associations gain ascendancy in the unconscious until they finally spill over into responsive behavior that the conscious mind now registers with a sense of surprise.

The conscious mind is surprised because it is presented with a response within itself that it cannot account for. The response is then described as having occurred "all by itself without the intervention of the subject's conscious intention; the response appears to be autonomous or "hypnotic."

Analogy and metaphor as well as jokes can be understood as exerting their powerful effects through the same mechanism of activating unconscious association patterns and response tendencies that suddenly sum-mate to present consciousness with an apparently "new" datum or behavioral response.