The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective.

Abstract

It seems plausible that the conception of the mind has evolved over the first hundred years ofpsychology in America . In this research, we studied this evolution by tracing changes in the kinds of metaphors used by psychologists to describe mental phenomena. A corpus ofmetaphors from 1894 to the present was collected and examined . The corpus consisted ofall metaphors for mental phenomena used in the first issue ofPsychological Review in each decade, beginning with the inception ofthe journal in 1894 and continuing with 1905, 1915, and so on through 1975 . These nine issues yielded 265 mental metaphors, which were categorized ac- cording to the type of analogical domain from which the comparison was drawn . The chief finding was that the nature ofthe mental metaphors . changed over time . Spatial meta- phors and animate-being metaphors predominated in the early stages, then declined in favor of systems metaphors, often taken from mathematics and the physical sciences . A secondary finding was that the numbers of mental metaphors varied . Metaphors for mental phenomena were more prevalent in the early and late stages of the corpus than in the middle stages (1935 to 1955) . These patterns are interpreted in terms of conceptual evolution in psychologists' models of the mind . In this article we examine historical changes in the metaphors used by American psychologists to de- scribe mental processes . Our aim is to use changes in metaphoric language to trace changes in the models of the mind that psychologists have held . It is by now accepted that researchers bring to their field of study a theoretical framework-which may be more or less explicitly conscious-in terms of which they construe the phenomena they observe (Koestler, 1964) . Moreover, these frameworks change