Mental Health as a Vision of Ecological Safety | Part 9

John P. Flynt, PhD
Oct 31, 2023
3 min read

Updated: Nov 10, 2023

Safety in Rituals of Mental Health

Metaphors Used to Talk About the Brain

Symbolic representations (like those of Humboldt) are also referred to as metaphors. Metaphors provide valuable and essential contributions to our understanding of ourselves (and the universe around us), as is emphasized in the classic work on metaphors by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we Live By. Indeed, as Lakoff and Johnson emphasize, it is highly unlikely that anything we know is not metaphorical. In this light, it is important to observe some cautions.

In her Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, neuroscientist Lisa Friedman Barrett issues strong advisories concerning what she regards as ways of not correctly speaking about the brain. Her statements relate to epistemology (language used to talk about reality) in science but bleed over into how mental health workers talk about mental health. The gist of her argument is that symbolic discourse (describing the universe in human terms) requires metaphors. But she argues that metaphors, if taken literally, can be problematic. Among some of the problematic metaphors she mentions are “genes for emotions,” “triune brain,” “reptilian brain,” “left and right (lobe) brain,” “rational (“prefrontal”) brain,” “emotional (“limbic”) brain,” “higher or more evolved brain,” “lower and less evolved brain,” and even to some extent “conscious” and “unconscious” brain.

However, such terms are metaphors used by therapists, and as metaphors they are often useful in therapy (which involves “mentalizing” (finding ways to speak about mental activity). Daniel Siegal, Bonny Badenock, Daniel Hill, Allan N. Shore–in general some of the best psychiatrists and psychologists on earth use such metaphors. By using these and many other metaphors, they have helped millions of mental health workers and the people they serve find language with which to talk in non-judgmental ways about mental health.

But Barrett is not saying anything that has not been said before over the centuries. Socrates said that someone who is wise does not contend to know what he or she does not know. Immanuel Kant emphasized this problem in his most famous work, written during the eighteenth century, The Critique of Pure Reason. He offered “phenomenon” as something analogous to what is talked about with metaphors. What metaphors refer to—which always remains open to new discovery—is “noumena.” Kant contended that our understanding of the universe never gets beyond phenomena (which can be interpreted as “the metaphorical”).

Werner Heisenberg, the renowned physicist of the twentieth century associated with “the uncertainty principle” emphasized that we literally cannot study anything without changing it and ourselves as we study it (Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science). Heisenberg reminds us that it is important to remember, then, that in everything we do, what we study is filtered by our capacity to experience. (This is the outlook of phenomenology in philosophy.) And more recently, Gregory Bateson described any concept or metaphor as a map, and he pointed out that there is problem with mistaking the map for the thing mapped (Steps to an Ecology of Mind). Paul Watzlawick, one of Bateson’s associates known for his work in the pragmatics of communication, provides discussions of this phenomenon (known as reification) in The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe We Know?

With respect to Humboldt and the metaphors he offers, it is probably better to ask, not about the “truth” of a metaphor, but about how useful particular metaphors are as aids to understanding. There is an adage from Daoist thought: The wise one points at the moon; and the one is not wise looks at the pointing finger.