Arguing that psychologists and their predecessors have invariably relied on metaphors in articulation, the contributors to this volume offer a new "key" to understanding a critically important area of human knowledge by specifying the major metaphors.

First published in 2000, this book explores the metaphors used by philosophers and psychologists to understand memory over the centuries.

When therapists hear patients talk of feeling "imprisoned," "burning with rage," "trapped," or "unequipped," they are witnessing manifestations of the symbolic attitude, the hallmark of all depth psychology. Most clinicians naturally respond to and use metaphors, but they often fail to understand the full potential of metaphoric images. This volume, in addressing the transforming power of metaphor, demonstrates how clinicians can deepen the therapeutic encounter.

This book explores the possibility that metaphor is a cognitive tool that people routinely use to understand abstract concepts (such as morality) in terms of superficially dissimilar concepts that are relatively easier to comprehend (such as cleanliness).

Curiosity about the human mind—what it is and how it functions—began long before modern psychology. But because the mind and its processes are so elusive, they could be described only by means of metaphor. Michael Kearns, in this prize-winning study, examines the development of metaphors of the mind in psychological writings from Hobbes through William James and in fiction from Defoe through Henry James. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the early nineteenth, metaphors of the mind as a relatively simple entity, either mechanical or biological, dominated both those engaged in psychological theorizing and novelists ranging from Richardson and Smollett through Dickens and the Brontes. In the nineteenth century, such psychologists as Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain conceived of the mind as a complex organism quite different from that embodied in earlier thinking, but their figurative language did not keep pace. The result was a tension between theoretical expression and actual discussion of mental phenomena

Edition statement taken from text, page 4 of cover.