Ricoeur's Theory of Metaphor as Trauma Praxis

Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and fall again. I am a poet, yes.

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Introduction

This article applies Paul Ricoeur's theory of the "living metaphor" in an effort to develop a poetic framework for expressing, representing and healing from experiences of trauma.¹ The aspect of Ricoeur's theory that I focus on, as his work on the living metaphor is extensive and must be narrowed down for the purposes of this article, is his argument that poetic expressions can manifest a dialectically tensional status of meaning that is linguistically and existentially a convergence of binary poles such as true and false, real and imagined, temporal and atemporal. Using Ricoeur's theory as a philosophical and hermeneutic foundation from which to apply poetics as a potential praxis for trauma intervention, I seek to add to scholarship in literary-based trauma studies and in psychotherapeutic traditions such as poetry therapy.² Doing so, it will be shown, has the ability to develop a poetic consciousness of trauma that embodies one's relationship with traumatic memory in order to enable survivors to view their experiences as a source of creativity and path toward integrative living rather than a hinderance to or deficiency from "normal" identity.³

I choose to focus on Ricoeur's articulation of metaphorical discourse's ability to represent a both/and experience of traditionally binary emotions or psychological states, the temporal and atemporal example above, because often for survivors, categorical and distinct divisions of temporality and emotion collapse. Sensory experiences, thoughts and emotions conflate into a seemingly singular experience that interrupts one's linear narrative of selfhood through the form of conscious or unconscious flashbacks and/or anxiety.⁴ By applying Ricoeur's theory of metaphorical discourse to the experience of living with and expressing traumatic memory, poetry becomes a means of manifesting in language such a breakdown of time-bound perception and identity. When the survivor becomes the author of her own poetically mediated representations of contradictory experiences such as love and hate, remembering and forgetting, metaphorical discourse offers a means of producing externalized representations of internally experienced emotional and psychological states for future self-reflection and interpretation. My goal here is to show how such externalizing of internally experienced states of consciousness yields opportunity for a hermeneutic process that invites aesthetic mediation to contribute to individual and collective integrative awareness and understanding of embodied histories of trauma.⁵

A strong tradition exists for applying Ricoeur's philosophical literary hermeneutics to socially and/or psychologically situated contexts such as trauma.⁶ For example in the book, "Feminist Explorations of Paul Ricoeur's Philosophy" (2016), theorists discuss Ricoeur's hermeneutic and literary-based thought in terms of contemporary feminist issues through intersectional analyses of race, gender, class, etc.⁷ Most often when Ricoeur's work is applied to socially situated contexts, however, theorists turn to his theory of narrative identity developed in the three-volume work, Time and Narrative (TN) rather than his work on metaphor as developed in The Rule of Metaphor (TRM).⁸ Such a choice is understandable. The reconfiguration of personal and historical events that Ricoeur maps out in TN as a production of various states of mimesis if done in the context of trauma or a politics of identity can have an empowering autobiographical function for the individual author or reader. Morny Joy clearly shows the benefits of such an application in her adaption of Ricoeur's theory of narrative identity to her study of incest survivors.⁹ I turn to Ricoeur's theory of metaphor rather than his work on narrative identity, because my view, which grows out of my doctoral work in Ricoeur's hermeneutics and Comparative Literature, my training in expressive arts therapy and my current community practice and research with survivors of gendered violence and trauma and my own experience as a survivor, is to facilitate expressions of embodied experiences of living with traumatic memory that in and of themselves...