I find the way Ella Freeman Sharpe (1940) describes the use of the individual metaphor in analysis a convincing example of how this task can be accomplished. As pointed out by Sara Flanders, Ella Freeman Sharpe was the first, in a series of lectures given in the 1930s to the British Society ‘to make the leap made famous by Lacan (…) locating in the mechanisms of the dream-work’ the laws of poetics, and equating ‘condensation and displacement with metaphor and metonymy’ (Flanders, 1993, p. 8).12However, in her essay on Sharpe’s literary and linguistic analysis of dreams, Mary Jacobus explains how ‘Sharpe troubles a strictly Lacanian account of the language of the unconscious’ as she ‘frequently represents dream- thoughts and phantasies concretely in terms of their manufacture, and even as a woven texture – literally, as textile – rather than metaphorically, as a linguistic text’ (Jacobus, 2005, p. 5).
What is shown by Sharpe’s clinical work is that the metaphorical language used in a session rests on an unconscious language that is not organised on the primacy of the signifier but on the primacy of bodily discharges. In the same way that the ‘implied or crystallized metaphors’ can reveal the reality of ‘past ages of history’, Sharpe describes the individual metaphors used in analysis as a verbal creation that reveals a pre-verbal reality, the forgotten reality of the infantile body: ‘Spontaneous metaphor used by a patient proves upon examination to be an epitome of a forgotten experience. It can reveal a present-day psychical condition which is based upon an original psycho-physical experience’ (Sharpe, 1940, p. 212).