Metaphor and Gestalt: Interaction Theory Revisited

Symbolic and Syncretic Cognition Among Schizophrenics and Visual Artists

“…Werner (1948) also believed that artistic perception and creative thinking could rely on, or have access to, this same syncretic level of cognition (Barten, 1983;Barten & Franklin, 1978). On the creative side, this dedifferentiation would allow for a flexibility of perception and thought (see, also, Ehrenzweig, 1953, for a somewhat similar view), as categories dissolve, become entwined, and in general interact, much as an interactionist approach to metaphor and metaphoric thinking would advocate (Glicksohn & Goodblatt, 1993). In Werner's (1957Werner's ( /1978a) terms, One might argue that in creative reorganization, psychological regression involves two kinds of operations: One is the dedifferentiation (dissolution) of existing schematized or automatized behavior patterns; the other consists in the activation of primitive levels of behavior from which undifferentiated (little-formulated) phenomena emerge.…”

166. Expressive movement and metaphoric meaning making in audio-visual media

“…With this dynamic view on cognitive processes, we assume that metaphoric meaning making can be understood as an embodied sensing and act of conceptualizing that emerges in and is constitutively bound to the respective communicative act itself. In this theoretical line, we look at how the principal subject is actually "projected upon" the subsidiary subject (Black 1962: 41), how the seeing or imagining of one thing "filters", "transforms", and "selects" certain aspects of the other subject (Black 1962: 42), how both metaphorical elements through the procedure of a sharing within an attentional focus shed light upon each other (Black 1962;Glicksohn and Goodblatt 1993). Or to put it in terms of Max Black's interaction theory: "It would be more illuminating […] to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing" (Black 1962: 37).…”

Adding an empirical dimension to the study of poetic metaphor

“…The theoretical framework underlying this project has been presented in Glicksohn and Goodblatt (1993), and developed in a number of recent papers (Glicksohn 1994;Goodblatt 1996). This framework integrates the paradigm established by Gestalt psychology with the Interaction theory of metaphor, as originally formulated by the literary critic I.A.…”

“…While Interaction theory is not the dominant theory of metaphor within which empirical research is being conducted (see Lakoff and Turner 1989;Shen 1989;Glucksberg and Keysar 1990;Gibbs 1994), it has the potential for guiding research on poetic metaphor, and for enabling a productive cross-fertilization of ideas in literary criticism and cognitive psychology (Waggoner 1990;Glicksohn and Goodblatt 1993). Interaction theory advocates a particular processoriented approach, which views the reader as being faced with a problem-situation presented by the metaphor and by the text.…”