Opening Up and Going In: Metaphors of Interiority and the Case of Humanistic Psychology

Abstract

This article considers the recurrence of metaphorical representations of psychological interiority in contemporary therapeutic discourse. Such metaphors of interiority, it is argued, help to explain not just the popularity and cultural meanings of therapeutic discourses, but the continuities and ruptures between distinct therapeutic sensibilities over time. Specifically, metaphors of interiority help us understand the relationship between an older, humanistic paradigm wherein interiority forms a problem of self-knowledge, authenticity and interpretation, and a newer, a neoliberal, paradigm in which interiority becomes a framework for exploitation and optimization of subjective capacities. The break, but also the continuity between these two sensibilities comes into focus as they are read through the spatial relations implied by a metaphor of interiority. Toward this end, this study attempts two related engagements, the first conceptual and the second historical. First, through a consideration of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and specifically the works of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors of interiority lend a unique somatic and spatial feel to therapeutic practices. This spatial feeling helps to explain the agential sense that therapeutic subjects express as they pursue states of psychic health by traversing interior space, or in "opening up" and "going in." The second half of this article applies these concepts to a cultural-historical case. The humanistic psychology movement of the 1960s and 1970s is examined for the ways in which metaphors of psychic interiority gave meaning and coherence to a specific set of therapeutic practices. In the writings of humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, metaphors of interiority are used to frame psychic interiority as a problem of interpretation and self-understanding. A distinct notion of self-authenticity is fashioned as a problem of knowing or confronting an inner life, although, at the same time, the imperative of interpretation would give way to another emergent paradigm fashioned on optimization, opportunity, and neoliberal entrepreneurship.