I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  “The metaphors made us stop in our tracks and think of products in a whole new way,” says the former exec. The metaphors even became marketing mantras for the group. Whenever new product concepts were discussed, members asked themselves: Who’s paying for the first few drinks? Does this let the bogeyman out of the closet without undue fear or alarm?

  The metaphors led to specific product innovations as well. To address the “cover charge” concerns, the company came up with plans that built in more coverage up front. The premium was a bit more expensive but it also included more, like paying a slightly higher cover charge at the bar but getting two free drinks. To prevent the healthcare bogeyman from scaring retirees to death, the company devised a scheme that standardized costs over a set number of years, thereby allowing better budgeting.

  Having gone into the Synectics process thinking the uninsured were making a strategic and possibly costly mistake, the client team came out thinking they were smart, generally well-informed people who felt they were making an intelligent, cost-effective choice. The Synectics work helped them to understand this target group’s perspective on the industry and to develop new product ideas that met their needs while also addressing their worries.

  For the former executive, the experience left a lasting impression: “Metaphors are so powerful in helping people see things in a new light. My aperture of sensitivity to metaphor is so much higher now.”

  While Synecticsworld’s client made the familiar world of health insurance strange by exploring the metaphors of the uninsured, practitioners of the emerging field of biomimicry make the strange world of nature familiar by emulating the survival strategies of living things to solve human problems.

  Biomimicry is yet another term imported from the Greek, drawn from the prefix bio (life) and the noun mimesis (imitation). Biomimicry is, literally, the imitation of life. Janine Benyus, the field’s most prominent theorist, calls biomimicry “innovation inspired by nature404.” Faced with a human problem—say, how to prevent hospital-acquired infections, like the “super-bug” methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)—biomimics look for natural models in which the same or a similar problem has already been solved. Once a suitable model is found, inventors, designers, and scientists copy it, adapting nature’s solution to fit the human need.

  “Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers405,” Benyus has said. “They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth . . . After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.”

  Nature’s R&D department may have already solved one of the biggest problems buffeting the shipping industry: fouling, the accretion of marine organisms on hulls. Coincidentally, this innovation could also help prevent hospital-acquired infections.

  As sticky marine critters accumulate on a hull, they act as a drag on the ship, decreasing efficiency and increasing fuel consumption. In pondering this problem, Anthony Brennan, founder of Sharklet Technologies406, made it strange by thinking about sharks. It occurred to him that, unlike other slow-moving sea creatures, such as whales, sharks aren’t bothered much by barnacles. Why not?

  To find out, Brennan and a University of Florida research team took impressions of shark skin and noticed that it featured a distinctive diamond pattern on its surface, kind of like the raised lozenges on manhole covers. They mimicked that pattern on a microscopic scale—millions of miniature raised bars arranged in diamond-like arrays—and found that it inhibited the adhesion of microorganisms. Applied to the hull of a ship, the pattern could help discourage fouling. Applied to hospital surfaces—such as nurse call buttons, bed rails, and bathroom doors—it could help deter the growth of the bacteria that cause MRSA.

  Sharklet Technologies has developed an adhesive film imprinted with the shark skin topography that can be applied to surfaces to inhibit germ growth. The company is also experimenting with ways to print the pattern directly onto objects, including everything from ship hulls to medical devices. The technology can be used in addition to—or better yet, instead of—marine paints, which can contaminate water, and antibiotics, which can encourage bacterial resistance.

  Biomimicry is a more practically minded variation on the objets trouvés movement in art. Artists working with objets trouvés, “found objects” or “readymades,” look to the environment for inspiration and innovation. Instead of creating a work from scratch, the artist identifies a pre-existing natural or man-made object and adapts it to serve his or her artistic purpose.

  Pablo Picasso made objets trouvés. After World War II, he had a studio in the French town of Vallauris next to a vacant lot used by local artisans as a junkyard. To create his 1950 sculpture She-Goat, Picasso scavenged the yard for discarded ceramic fragments and metal shards. Two jugs became the goat’s udders and an old wicker basket became its rib cage. Describing his working method for this piece, Picasso said: “I follow the way back from the basket to the rib cage407: from the metaphor to reality. I make reality visible, because I use the metaphor.”

  Biomimics and Synectics practitioners also use metaphor to make reality visible. Biomimics “biologize” their questions, identifying themselves with a purely non-human entity and speculating about how that entity would solve the problem in question, just as Gordon and Prince suggested. Ask not how I can solve that problem but how nature has already solved it, is the biomimic’s motto.

  Biomimics interrogate flora and fauna to find models that can be carried over into the human environment, just as Synectics practitioners question consumers and apply their metaphors to new product development. Both biomimicry and Synectics find patterns in the data that lead to new perspectives and new possibilities, just as Picasso found a she-goat in a heap of rubbish.

  Biomimics and Synectics practitioners, like found artists, are metaphorical handymen, creating new and useful things by recycling bits and pieces already made by nature or by others. This is an odd job but not an uncommon one. Innovation and invention have always progressed by looking for correlations and connections in nature. Biomimicry and Synectics are just the latest names for an age-old practice by which we apply metaphorical thinking to transform what we have at hand into what we have in mind.

  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone after studying the operation of the bones inside the human ear. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, engineer of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, realized how to dig tunnels under the Thames for the London Underground by watching a worm burrow into a piece of timber. The distinctive design of Pringles resulted from a Synectics session in which participants thought about how compaction was accomplished in nature; an analogy with the way fallen leaves stack together led to the innovative shape of the potato chip and its vertical packaging.

  Benjamin Franklin made many of his discoveries about electricity by looking to nature for analogies. Franklin observed that electricity behaved a lot like lightning, a resemblance he described in detail in a journal entry on November 7, 1749:

  Electrical fluid agrees with lightning408 in these particulars: 1. Giving light. 2. Color of the light. 3. Crooked direction. 4. Swift motion. 5. Being conducted by metals. 6. Crack or noise in exploding. 7. Subsisting in water or ice. 8. Rending bodies as it passes through. 9. Destroying animals. 10. Melting metals. 11. Firing inflammable substances. 12. Sulphurous smell. The electric fluid is attracted by points. We do not know whether this property is in lightning. But since they agree in all the particulars wherein we can already compare them, is it not probable they agree likewise in this? Let the experiment be made.

  A good metaphor, like a bolt of lightning, provides a sudden flash of insight, a glimpse of illuminated ground on which experiments can be made. Things look strange when lit by lightning, but it is that very strangeness that enables us to see them differently.

  Freud described “the uncanny” as “that class of the frightening409 which leads back to what is known of old and long fa
miliar . . . An uncanny effect410 is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced.” There is something of the uncanny about metaphor. Metaphors do not efface the distinction between imagination and reality but they do, to use Wallace Stevens’s language, enhance and intensify it. In the act of satisfying the desire for innovation—in design, in business, or in the arts—metaphor has an uncanny knack for bringing imagination to life.

  Metaphor and Psychology

  A Little Splash of Color from My Mother

  Synectics consultants use metaphor to spur business innovation; psychotherapists James Lawley and Penny Tompkins use it to inspire psychological insight. Through a process called symbolic modeling, they help clients create and explore metaphors around crucial emotions or personal dilemmas. To learn more about the technique, I booked a session with Lawley and Tompkins. A few weeks before our appointment, my mother died and I decided that my mother’s death would be the starting point for our conversation.

  By the time I met with Lawley and Tompkins, my mother’s funeral was over. The initial shock had passed. I had spent a week cleaning out her house, the house in which I grew up. Now things were getting back to normal. The routine business of living had resumed. As I struggled to identify exactly how I felt, to reconcile the contrast between the intensity of my mother’s death and the abrupt return to normalcy, the best I could come up with was, “No different.”

  “Anything else about that ‘No different’?” Lawley asked.

  “The feeling is everywhere, diffuse,” I said, “like a light blanket, not noticeable because it’s so light. The most remarkable thing about it is that it has so few characteristics. It’s almost nothing, like wallpaper.”

  “Anything else about that ‘wallpaper’?”

  “You ignore it, especially if it’s drab.”

  “Anything else about that ‘drab wallpaper’?”

  “I don’t like it, its drabness. It reminds me of the house I grew up in.”

  My family moved to the house I grew up in when it was brand new, in the early 1970s. As a teenager, I loathed that house. It symbolized to me everything that was flimsy and oppressive about growing up in the suburbs.

  The hollow plywood door to my bedroom still had the deep gash cut into it when my brother threw his shoe at me and missed. The plastic towel rack in the bathroom still fell off the wall every time I tried to hang a wet towel on it. The lawn and the driveway were still impeccably maintained, just like every other lawn and driveway on this impeccably maintained street.

  In going through my mother’s things, I was struck by how few personal possessions she had. She had lots of bric-a-brac—Norman Rockwell commemorative plates, several plaques with “An Irish Blessing” printed on them, some mildly patriotic trinkets—but little else.

  The trinkets kept turning up everywhere, not just on the walls but also in drawers, under beds, in closets, many of them sealed in plastic bags. My mother also had an astonishing array of Christmas and Halloween decorations, which she carefully packed up and stored after displaying for the holidays. This stuff had always made me inexpressibly depressed, something about the impersonal sameness of it all, like wallpaper.

  Then, in the powder room closet under some old packets of aspirin, bottles of foot spray, and a variety of stray Christmas tree ornaments (all sealed in individual plastic bags), I found my mom’s 1944 high school yearbook. In its warped and moldy pages was a pile of old photographs along with the drawings I had made as a kid for Mother’s Day, Christmas, and my parents’ wedding anniversaries.

  The photographs showed my mom in all her glory—dressed as Mother Earth, wrapped in a bed sheet with a plastic Christmas wreath on her head, during one of the many parties my parents threw in the basement; at the front door during her surprise fiftieth birthday bash, gasping in delight and disbelief as she watched Aunt Peggy outfitted as a drum majorette leading a parade of friends and relatives down the middle of our street; tanning in a lawn chair in the backyard with slices of cucumber strategically placed over her eyes.

  Among my colorful crayon drawings—full of balloons, exploding fireworks, and huge red hearts—was an apologetic note in which my mother explained that the drawings of my sister and brothers were missing because they had been ruined in one of the frequent post-rainstorm floods in our basement.

  “My mom was fun and funny,” I said. “The drab wallpaper blotted out the colorful patches.”

  “Anything else about that ‘blotted out’?” Lawley asked.

  “That’s what blots out feelings. Memories of my mother can be splashes of color.”

  “When you think about those ‘splashes of color,’ then what happens?”

  “It’s not so drab anymore. It comes alive.”

  The drab wallpaper concealed a lot of feelings—about my mother, my childhood, the house I grew up in. By following the metaphor, aided by Lawley’s gentle promptings, I uncovered memories and emotions that had been papered over long ago.

  Lawley and Tompkins are practitioners of “clean language,” a form of talk therapy developed by New Zealand psychotherapist David Grove. Grove, who died in 2008 at the age of fifty-seven, worked with people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—war veterans and victims of violent crime or psychological or sexual abuse. In the 1980s, he began noticing that when clients described their most troubling emotions and most traumatic memories, they always spoke in metaphors.

  It is easy enough to label a specific emotion, such as grief, fear, pride, or happiness. It is much harder to convey the actual qualitative experience of that emotion. But metaphorical language can describe the indescribable. Saying that grief is like “having your heart ripped out” or that joy is “popping out of your body like a champagne cork” is not just the most vivid way to express the experience of these feelings, it is the only way to express the experience of these feelings.

  “We can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else,” George Eliot wrote in The Mill on the Floss. In saying that my feelings about my mother’s death were like drab wallpaper, I discovered what my feelings really were.

  Lawley and Tompkins, who are based in the United Kingdom, spent five years studying with Grove to produce a systematic account of his approach to metaphor in their book Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling. “I noticed, if I didn’t force people411 when they were talking they would naturally start using metaphor to describe their experience,” Grove told them. “So I realized here was another way to structure experience. I decided that metaphor was a whole language worthy of study.”

  Grove paid careful attention to clients’ metaphors, observing that they gradually took on a highly personalized significance. If a client stayed with a metaphor long enough, it became increasingly elaborate, often evolving into a kind of parable that contained an important lesson. The metaphors had a consistent structure and a direct relevance to the client’s experience. And when the metaphors changed, Grove noticed, the people changed, too. Grove devised clean language as a technique to help clients, those with PTSD and those without, develop their own metaphors—and use those metaphors to achieve emotional insight and psychological change.

  Grove’s clean language is in many ways a dialect of Jung’s active imagination. Both practices rely on client-generated imagery and metaphors to facilitate the process of change. But clean language is not the only psychological discipline to tap into the transformative power of metaphor.

  The practice of “guided imagery” is a kind of active imagination employed to help people resolve and recover from illness. Metaphors alone don’t cure physical afflictions, of course, just as they don’t on their own resolve political disputes. But as research reveals more and more links between physical and mental health, metaphor is increasingly recognized as a method by which the mind can boost the body’s healing processes.

  A study of fifty-six patients scheduled for elective cardiac surgery412, for
instance, found that individuals’ beliefs about their conditions before their operations correlated with their quality of life, feelings of depression, and levels of disability three months after the operations. Those patients who believed that their illness would be short, that it would not result in serious complications, and that their recovery depended to some extent on themselves recuperated faster than those who believed the opposite. The researchers concluded that patients’ beliefs about their illness strongly influenced their recovery, and they recommended counseling sessions to help put people in a more healing frame of mind.

  That is not to say patients should be given overly optimistic—or overly pessimistic—expectations about their prognoses. This is what Susan Sontag rightly decried about the commonly used metaphors for cancer and HIV/AIDS. But the way a condition is described primes patients’ beliefs about and attitudes toward that condition. Medical metaphors are therefore more than just a matter of a pleasant bedside manner.

  Indeed, nurses trained in clean language reported that patients felt better understood413 when they articulated their own metaphors for their symptoms than when they accepted pre-existing metaphors. Empowering patients through metaphor can be particularly helpful for stress-related illnesses, such as heart conditions, in which a patient’s state of mind has a clear impact on his or her state of health.

  What makes Grove’s work, and Lawley and Tompkins’s systematization of it, different from techniques like guided imagery is the relentless pursuit of the unexpected and idiosyncratic in client metaphors and the commitment to hold fast to the client’s own words and imagery. What Jung wrote about images Grove believed of metaphors: “Images have a life of their own414. When you concentrate on a mental picture, it begins to stir, the image becomes enriched by details, it moves and develops.”