The mirror metaphor in the processes of modeling mental activity in the scientific psychological discourse

The study of the metaphor as a mechanism of cognition is an essential direction in modern cognitive linguistics of the 20th and 21st centuries. The epistemological potential of the metaphor is most clearly traced in the representation of knowledge about intangible entities. They include the human psyche which has become an object of study of psychology and related practice-oriented disciplines. Mental activity is a complex formation that includes mental and psychophysiological processes, feelings, emotions that do not have denotative correlations. Therefore, its study is possible on the basis of analogies to objects and phenomena of external reality. The functioning of mental activity consists in the active reflection of objective reality by the subject. As a result, a holistic view of the world is formed in a person’s mind. The latter has determined the aim of this work - to consider the human psyche as a mirror that reflects the outside world in the inner world of a person at the cognitive, emotional and bodily levels. The research methodology was based on the theory of conceptual metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and metaphorical modeling. The empirical basis of the study was formed by metaphorical contexts taken from the following fields: general psychology, social psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychosomatics. The results of the study show that metaphorical modeling of the human psyche based on ideas about the mirror is carried out as a three-part frame structure and is presented in the form of three basic metaphorical models: (1) mental activity is likened to a mirror; (2) the human psyche is modeled as an object that can be reflected in a mirror; (3) social interaction is structured as a space filled with mirrors. Each metaphorical model contains certain conceptual areas of knowledge. Modeling mental activity as a mirror is connected with the representation of knowledge about the structure of the human psyche. It includes consciousness and the area of the unconscious modeled as mirrors that reflect the outside world in the inner world of a person. Cognitive and unconscious mental processes associated with the process of learning new realities are also structured on the basis of this model. The assimilation of the human psyche to an object is linked to the possibility of studying somatic diseases and bodily manifestations, which are modeled as a mirror reflecting the human mental world, through the body language. Society is presented as a space where each person is likened to a mirror that is reflected in other mirrors surrounding them. Reflection becomes an analogy to the process of social cognition, as a result of which a person forms social knowledge about themselves through a system of ideas about how other people perceive them. Knowledge about psychotherapeutic techniques and the specificity of the work of a psychologist with patients within psychotherapy is structured on the same basis. sk Polytechnic University (Tomsk, Russian Federation). E-mail: rahimovara@tpu.ru

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