Metaphorical Thought and Politics

I have already written that metaphors have power over us. I want to go a little further in exploring the ways literary and linguistic metaphors might relate to historical psychology. Previously I had assumed that the power of familial metaphor over thought had come from a long period in which that metaphor was developed culturally and linguistically. However, there is another possibility: that the psychology comes first, and the development of language is a secondary phenomenon. That is the contention, as far as I can tell, of Johnson and Lakoff in Metaphors We Live By (1980):

Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature [p.3]... Metaphors... are among our principle vehicles for understanding. And they play a central role in the construction of social and political reality [p.159].

Moreover, as they point out, "metaphorical thought is unavoidable, ubiquitous, and largely unconscious [p.272]." This understanding of conceptual metaphor, and its deep unconscious influence, is important to my project. I don't need to show that Federalists in the 1780s always spoke about politics in terms of family relations. Rather, I need to establish only that it was a dominant metaphor, unconsciously shaping thought. I can then structure my own exegesis around such a metaphor, without becoming detached from the inner lives of Federalists themselves. At the least, I will be helping understand an aspect of their thought.