Memories Are Made Of… Metaphor
We went to see the musical Mamma Mia in London last night, for my husband’s birthday treat. It was a huge trip down memory lane – neither of us were big Abba fans, but like most people our age we know the words to all the songs
The songs reminded me of the period when my younger sister was a huge Abba fan, and kept her bedroom door open as she blasted the whole house with their hits. Was that the hot summer of 1976, when I got sunburnt most days, and then got ill from eating too many strawberries?
Hearing “Waterloo” in the finale reminded Steve of watching “Top Of The Pops” and buying his first record. And the whole occasion reminded Steve’s father than when he was Steve’s current age, he was 13 months away from retirement…
“That reminds me” is one of the big themes in Hofstadter and Sander’s new book Surfaces and Essences, about the role of analogy in thought. Every time we say, or even think, “That reminds me…” we’re making an analogy between the current situation and a remembered one. We’re saying that this, now, is like that, then.
They observe: “The triggering of memories by analogy lies so close to what seems to be the essence of being human that it is hard to imagine what mental life would be like without it.
“Asking why one idea triggers another similar one would be like asking why a stone falls if one lets go of it three feet above the ground…
“Analogy-making, far from being merely and occasional mental sport, is the very lifeblood of cognition, permeating it at all levels…
“No thought can be formed that isn’t informed by the past, or, more precisely, we think only thanks to analogies that link our present to our past.”
Given all of this, it seems unsurprising that working directly with someone’s unconscious, spontaneous analogies – or metaphors, as the Clean Languagers would call them – can have a profound healing effect on traumatic memories. And that, funnily enough, was what David Grove originally designed Clean Language to achieve.