Understanding analogy is the single most important issue in multiculturalism and in psychotherapy. It’s what enables the Christian to understand that the Muslim feels about burning the Koran the way the Christian would feel about burning the Bible. It’s more than empathy; empathy allows the Christian to see that the Muslim is upset, just as the Christian would be upset if he lost something to which he was attached but which was ultimately false. Empathy analogizes the Koran to the Christian’s attachment to false beliefs. Analogy is needed to fully grasp the significance of burning the Koran. It’s what allows the privileged to understand the marginalized. It’s what allows the therapist to understand that the way the patient approaches the hierarchy in therapy is like the way she approaches other internal and external hierarchies.
A strange thing about analogy is that once you use it, the thing you analogize loses its quality of a sacred cow. For a thing to be sacred, it must be literal, and to be literal, it must be understood in a fundamental frame, a context that cannot be transliterated. If you say that the thing that matters most to you is combatting racism, say, you can proceed with zealotry. But as soon as you think that combatting racism is like welcoming people who at first seem intolerable and that this in turn is like welcoming racists, your zeal is deflected.
Similarly, once you analogize yourself to other people, you lose certainty about who you are. Instead of defining yourself as virtuous and valorous, you have to see yourself as a bundle of complex agendas. This can bring peace and freedom, which is why people pursue it in spiritual practice, psychotherapy, and elsewhere, but it can also bring confusion, which is why people resist it. Part of the appeal of turning clinical psychology into a healthcare profession, besides the fact that it’s where they keep the money, is that it allows people to treat depression, anxiety, and disappointment as literal conditions that leave intact their personas and self-definitions.
Jesus is one of my heroes because of his concern for the marginalized and his appreciation of analogy, which he called parable (from a Greek word that means comparison or analogy). That all speech is metaphoric is hinted at by the fact that the word, talk, comes from tale; the Spanish word for talking, hablar, comes from fable; and the French word for talking, parler, comes from parable. Jesus said two things about analogy that you might want to keep in mind. In Matthew 3:10, he explains to his disciples that he teaches in parables because to those who understand them, “it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven,” but to those who do not understand them, “it has not been given.” Thus is analogic thinking a sifting of people, as he discusses in the same chapter. Then, when the disciples still don’t get it, after a parable about leavening, he tells them, in Matthew 16:11, “How could you fail to perceive that I was not speaking about bread?” (New Revised Standard Version.) Are we willing to sacrifice our certainty and self-righteousness to get to heaven? (For God’s sake, don’t tell me I have to specify that “heaven” in that sentence is a metaphor.)
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 