Analogy And Metaphor As Activators Of Unconscious Association Patterns

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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.
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