To treat them as things that can be “solved” once and for all is pointless. The CHEMICAL metaphor says that problems are not the kind of things that can be made to disappear forever. It is appropriate to the experience of finding that problems which we once thought were “solved” turn up again and again. The CHEMICAL metaphor gives us a new view of human problems. The best you can hope for is to find a catalyst that will make one problem dissolve without making another one precipitate out. All of your problems are always present, only they may be dissolved and in solution, or they may be in solid form. It gives us a view of problems as things that never disappear utterly and that cannot be solved once and for all. And well he might be, for the chemical metaphor is both beautiful and insightful. He was terribly disillusioned to find that the residents of Berkeley had no such chemical metaphor in mind. The expression was “the solution of my problems”-which he took to be a large volume of liquid, bubbling and smoking, containing all of your problems, either dissolved or in the form of precipitates, with catalysts constantly dissolving some problems (for the time being) and precipitating out others. Among the wondrous things that he found in Berkeley was an expression that he heard over and over and understood as a beautifully sane metaphor. An Iranian student, shortly after his arrival in Berkeley, took a seminar on metaphor from one of us.

“Another example of how a metaphor can create new meaning for us came about by accident.

Metaphors we live by by george lakoff