Below is the full, polished English short essay you requested.
It is titled:
**On the Adequate Metaphor:
A Note on Psychoanalytic Storytelling**
I’ve written it in a register suitable for a serious psychoanalytic, philosophical, or literary audience—a text that could appear in a journal, a seminar, or a collection of reflective essays.
It keeps the soul of your images (套路、鳥故事、小雪、九號小便斗、Bolaño), but transforms them into a coherent conceptual meditation.
**On the Adequate Metaphor:
A Note on Psychoanalytic Storytelling**
Saturday, November 22, 2025
Every psychoanalytic case, when retold, tends to arrive with a structure that feels strangely inevitable. There is a certain grammar to the analytic anecdote—a choreography of transferences, ruptures, childhood scenes, returns of the repressed, critical moments of silence. One might call this the “plot-device” of psychoanalysis, the narrative scaffold that allows these stories to be told at all. Without this scaffold, we would likely fail to tell even a passable story; with it, we succeed only in producing what might be called a beautifully crafted but ultimately “birdless” tale—an elegant narrative devoid of the very strangeness that makes a life singular.
To master the psychoanalytic plot is to realize that its mastery does not guarantee truth. In fact, mastery may hinder it. Once the story follows the expected arc, the event—what Blanchot or Lacan might call the point of rupture, the point that refuses meaning—has already been tamed. In this sense, the clinician finds themselves caught in a double bind:
without the analytic plot, one cannot speak;
with the analytic plot, one speaks only in clichés.
To break this bind, one must remember what Bolaño found on the Costa Brava in the middle of the night:
a story written without a plot and without a bird.
A story not ornamented by meaning, nor disciplined by form.
A story that stands on the edge of a cliff simply because the cliff exists.
In therapy, we often speak of healing as oscillating between relationship and interpretation. The relationship heals slowly, through endless time; interpretation heals abruptly, through cutting insight. I find myself wanting neither. What I seek is something rarer: an adequate metaphor, a single image capable of carrying the weight of a life—not because it is grand or mythic, but because it is just enough, just precise enough, just absurd enough to hold together what would otherwise fall apart.
An adequate metaphor is not the archetype, not the father-complex, not the lost object, not even the trauma inscribed in childhood. Those metaphors are too large, too ready-made, too easily circulated. What I need is something smaller, stranger, more contingent. Something whose singularity resists universalization.
And yet, the truth is simple:
I have not found such a metaphor.
What I have found instead is this:
the day after the solar term of Light Snow,
Urinal Number Nine
at a highway rest stop on the westbound road.
Nothing more.
It occurred several weeks ago—an unremarkable stop at the Xi-Hu service area, a fleeting encounter with a porcelain fixture marked with the modest dignity of its number. Yet this object has stayed with me, refusing to dissolve into the flow of days. I remember its angle, its quiet gleam, its distance from the others. I remember the cold air, the fluorescent hum, the faint echo of water against tile. Nothing in it resembles a symbol. Nothing aspires to meaning.
And perhaps for that very reason, it is adequate—
or at least closer to adequacy than the grand metaphors psychoanalysis has inherited.
The adequate metaphor does not elevate life; it anchors it.
It does not interpret; it interrupts.
It does not generalize; it insists.
It is not a concept but a remainder.
Not an insight but a residue.
Not a revelation but a stubborn, almost laughable particularity.
In that sense, Urinal Number Nine may not be the metaphor I wanted, but it is the one that appeared—
without plot, without bird,
a small cliff at the edge of a very ordinary afternoon.
Perhaps psychoanalytic storytelling must begin again from there:
not from the well-formed narrative,
not from the inherited archetype,
but from the object that lingers without asking to be understood.
A metaphor just adequate enough
to accompany a life.
If you’d like, I can help you write:
- a companion essay titled “The Birdless Tale: On the Failure of Psychoanalytic Narration”,
- or a Chinese version of this piece,
- or an extended version that could serve as part of your《自體的心理學（2025）》seminar.
Just tell me, and I will write it.
