The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness

I read this book years ago when it first came out. My training is in art and psychology, and I was developing a speciality in sand tray therapy with children. In contradistinction to the last review I found this text to be a wonderful study demonstrating the importance of play in the process of learning. I still use several slides photographed from the book when I teach about the process of play therapy and sandplay therapy. Most children intuitively learn about the world in a series of excursions from right brain knowing in the process of play to left brain comprehension and verbalization. I thought it was brilliant.

The author introduces and explores the concept of "the Metaphoric Mind." He admittedly does not originate much of the thought in this book, but rather collects it from a variety of sources and then adds his own opinion to it. Still, it is clear that the author is making an additional contribution of his own. In a nutshell, the metaphoric mind is the sort of intuitive, preconscious, "right brained" counterpart to our rationale, logical, "left brain." Some of the material is dated (see Robert Ornstein's _The_Right_Mind_) in terms of the physiological basis for the metaphoric mind. Nevertheless, the concept holds today and the most valuable part of the book, the case for recognition of the metaphoric mind as the necessary and appropriate counterpart to the rationale mind, is intact. All-in-all a thought provoking book which should be of special interest to anyone pursing the topics of Zen, Right/Left Mindedness and Creativity.Table of Contents: 1. In the Beginning2. The Rational Side of Metaphor 3. Metaphors of Cycle and Line 4. Rational Mindscapes 5. Shadows of Balance 6. The Gift of Beginning 7. Metaphoric Mindscapes 8. A Short Editorial 9. Sources of Metaphor 10. Motivation and Metaphor 11. The Human Triangle 12. The Fourth Dimension 13. The Disease of Imbalance 14. The New Child