And so what is this writing? It is analysis by metaphor, an attempt to see where I am, metaphorically speaking. I can only say that I fell into this world of words; exactly when and how is always a matter of reconstruction from within this womb of words. Analysis is a perceptual process, an envisioning in four dimensions; it organizes the unorganized. Metaphor resists this translation of the many into "the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." Metaphor insists "Thou art That." In the world evoked by metaphor there is no one, only many; there is "nothing made of parts."

So what does the analyst do when he/she confronts the recalcitrant metaphor? Freud incorporates the world of metaphor into the world of perception. The reality principle asserts the dominance of perception. But dominance is not victory and Freud was pessimistic concerning any resolution to this war between reality and the human unconscious.

There is, in my experience, a resistance to this dominance of the reality principle, a resistance to the insistence that all experience is conceptually produced, to the faith that, in the absence of perception, there is only the void. Perhaps metaphor does not originate in the conceptual process but in imagination; perhaps imagination is original.