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  • Finding Out What the Speaker is Saying Before Explaining Why He Says It
  • Victoria Y. Allison-Bolger (bio)
Keywords

auditory verbal hallucinations, ipseity, metaphor, hypostasis, ordinary language philosophy

The interpretation of the patient’s extraordinary remarks as indicating disturbances of ipseity turns on the assertion that we should not understand their complaints as ‘merely metaphorical.’ There is an established opinion in psychopathology that patients mean what they say literally. Thus, in thought insertion they believe that thoughts, as mental objects, are actually put inside their heads. The authors follow this tradition when they say that patients construct an inner space and imbue their thoughts and feelings with spatial qualities. The conception of the mind as ‘the auditorium of our inner monologues’ has philosophical precedents. This picture is not of itself pathological, but it can be misleading if we take it as a literal account of the structure of the mind and mental states.1 This is what the authors assume patients are doing. In their talk of structures of self-consciousness, they seem to be doing it themselves.

The stark opposition of literal and figurative speech misrepresents the nature of metaphor.2 In particular, metaphors are not mere ornaments, but conceptual structures that are fundamental to our understanding of the most ordinary of objects. This can be seen in the etymology of ordinary words, for example, lees meaning sediment or dregs, derives from the Irish lige meaning bed, and the Old English licgan, to recline. We use metaphors to express concepts, but they also shape our conceptions. To get a grip on abstract concepts, we need to use other concepts that we understand more clearly. Our conception of emotions is poorly delineated, so to talk about them we use others that are better characterized. Thus, we can talk about emotions in the vocabulary of space: falling in love, being in love, and being head over heels in love. We cannot talk about mental states and feelings without using the language of common objects in a secondary, or transferred sense.3 This is not just a matter of identifying similarities between items, but of a deeper correspondence between the concept and the entailments of the metaphor used to express it. Concepts may be expressed using an array of metaphors, each with different, but nonetheless salient, entailments.

The authors do not distinguish between what the speaker means and what the audience think he means. When they say his remarks should not be understood as metaphors, they are implying that they were not intended as such, that he meant what he said literally and that he should be taken [End Page 183] literally. There are two senses of ‘speaking literally’ that are relevant here. In the first, a word is used in its primary sense in a context where the secondary sense applies. This is described by Perceval, who says that “the spirit speaks poetically, but the man understands it literally,” as in case of a person who says he is a china vessel and does not just mean that he is frail, but that he may be destroyed at any moment (Landis 1964, 141). Poetical and literal speech can be distinguished by virtue of their different entailments. Thus, Arnold (1806, 127) describes a man who “fancied that his legs were nothing but glass, and for that reason dared on no account venture to stand upon them; but was carried from his bed to the fire-side, and there sat from morning till night.” He was rid of this ‘absurd imagination’ when his maid hit him on the leg and he leapt to his feet and found his legs could support him.

The second sense of ‘speaking literally’ involves hypostasis, in which intangibles and abstractions are reified or personified. Bleuler (1950, 97) identifies this as a feature of voice hearing. Thus, voices can be represented as hostile powers that victimize or control the patient, beating him or putting thoughts in his head. They are reified as people or in bizarre ways, for example, as a large, ugly mouth perched above the subject’s ear (Hanfling 1993).

Hypostasis is akin to morbid objectification as described by the authors. They say that the...

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