Tag Archives: Psychology

Essays, Language, Philosophy, Psychology

Language: ‘Metaphors Make Life An Adventure’

Psyche Magazine (March 25, 2025) by Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words

Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
– from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer

Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
– from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer

Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.

This was among the more important claims made by Susanne K Langer (1895-1985), a neglected American philosopher now experiencing a revival. Langer began her career when the analytic approach was in its formative stages. Women philosophers were rare, and women philosophers specialising in logic were an anomaly. However, the argument she made in her bestselling Philosophy in a New Key (1941) – that music and the other arts bear logical insights that language, science and mathematics can’t capture – served to marginalise her from a philosophical establishment that was, by then, hostile to women. One of Langer’s students, Arthur Danto, later explained why he rarely cited her: in graduate school he picked up that she was regarded as ‘poison’ to a philosophical career.

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One of Langer’s legacies is to help us see that language – to stay fresh, to keep step – needs words to be ‘incorrigible weasels’, double agents. Words mean more than we can say, which lets us say new things with old words. Metaphor, Langer reminds us, is what makes ‘human life an adventure in understanding’.

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Sue Curry Jansen is professor emeritus of media and communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her books include Walter Lippmann (2012) and Stealth Communications (2016).

Jeff Pooley is a research associate and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of mediastudies.press. His books include James W Carey and Communication Research (2016) and the co-edited Society on the Edge (2021).

Essays, Ideas, Society

Ideas & Society: ‘The Winter Of Civilization’

AEON MAGAZINE (February 28, 2025):

I came across Byung-Chul Han towards the end of the previous decade, while writing a book about the pleasures and discontents of inactivity. My first researches into our culture of overwork and perpetual stimulation soon turned up Han’s The Burnout Society, first published in German in 2010. Han’s descriptions of neoliberalism’s culture of exhaustion hit me with that rare but unmistakable alloy of gratitude and resentment aroused when someone else’s thinking gives precise and fully formed expression to one’s own fumbling intuitions.

Han’s critique of contemporary life centres on its fetish of transparency; the compulsion to self-exposure driven by social media and fleeting celebrity culture; the reduction of selfhood to a series of positive data-points; and the accompanying hostility to the opacity and strangeness of the human being.

At the heart of Han’s conception of a burnout society (Müdigkeitsgesellschaft) is a new paradigm of domination. The industrial society’s worker internalises the imperative to work harder in the form of superego guilt. Sigmund Freud’s superego, a hostile overseer persecuting us from within, comes into being when the infantile psyche internalises the forbidding parent. In other words, the superego has its origin in figures external to us, so that, when it tells us what to do, it is as though we are hearing an order from someone else. The achievement society of our time, Han argues, runs not on superego guilt but ego-ideal positivity – not from a ‘you must’ but a ‘you can’. The ego-ideal is that image of our own perfection once reflected to our infantile selves by our parents’ adoring gaze. It lives in us not as a persecutory other but as a kind of higher version of oneself, a voice of relentless encouragement to do and be more.

To digitalise a painting is to decompose it, to deprive it of ground

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Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst in private practice in London. He is professor emeritus of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths University of London. His latest books include Losers (2021) and All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World (2024).