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My group had a pretty rich time of it, y'day, rolling about in the unconscious of Walt Whitman: reading portions of his text aloud, exploring it, feeling it, thinking and talking together about its use-value for us.

One spot where we got a little tangled up, though, as we were thinking about the difference between conscious and unconscious processing, had to do with the difference between "metaphoric" and "metonymic" figures of speech. Wikipedia is (as often) very clarifying about where we got tangled up:

both figures involve the substitution of one term for another; in metaphor, this substitution is based on similarity; in metonymy, on "proximity." Metonymy is particularly important to cognitive linguistics, because it points to a very important aspect of how we make sense of things: we take a well-understood or easy-to-perceive aspect of something, and use it to stand for the thing as a whole, or for some other part of it.

Where our tangling up got really interesting to me, though, was in the various test cases in which we found ourselves able to turn metonymies into metaphors, and vice versa; talk about looping between consciousness and the unconscious!