Metaphor: Its Therapeutic Use and Construction

A Professional Guide to Using Metaphor in Psychotherapy and Counseling

Martin Cohen

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781532644733
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book helps counselors/therapists in all treatment modalities effectively use the extended metaphor as a therapeutic tool. It is a needed addition to every therapist's tool kit. The book will show you how to create a personalized and carefully constructed metaphor to reach a resistant client. This is especially important when we consider that each client is an individual and requires treatment specific to his or her needs. You will find a detailed description of the components used to create original therapeutic metaphors in a step-by-step fashion along with a rich and varied collection of metaphor examples. Two full-length annotated metaphors are provided to help you effect positive change in your clients. This book is a must for all mental health professionals.

1

Understanding Metaphor

Metaphor is both important and odd—its importance odd and its oddity important.

—Nelson Goodman, Language of Art

As philosophy grows more abstract we think increasingly by means of metaphors that we profess not to be relying on.

—I. A. Richards, Life and Work

Each story conveys a different view of reality and represents a special way of seeing.

—Donald A. Schon, “Generative Metaphor”

A basic aim of the physical and social sciences is to find general explanations of natural events; usually such explanations are called theories. The field of metaphor is no different in its efforts to search out not just the meaning of metaphor, but also a theory that will help to explain this multi–faceted phenomena. Over time, academicians have developed, criticized, and expanded theories of metaphor, what Kövecses (2002, p. xiii) calls the “cognitive linguistic study of metaphor”. They regard metaphor as an important part of life, discourse and learning, and developed theories to more completely explain this phenomenon (see especially Kovecses (2nd ed.), Reynolds and Schwartz 1983, Lakeoff and Johnson 1978, Black 1962, Tourangeau and Sternberg 1982, Torneke 2017).

Innumerable explanations of metaphor come from Aristotle—“Metaphor, is by far the most important thing to master”—to Frost, “All thinking is metaphorical.” I have been selective and diligently tried to choose the works that best illuminate the subject. Let’s begin with a useful review of the understanding of metaphor.

According to Tourangeau and Sternberg (1982), the metaphor is a comparison in which one term (the tenor or subject of the comparison) is asserted to bare a partial resemblance (the ground of the comparison) to something else (the vehicle), to sustain a literal comparison. Put more simply, their comparison theory asserts that metaphorical utterances involve a comparison or similarity between two or more objects. For example, the metaphor, “David is a lion in battle,” compares two figures of unlike nature. Yet in some respect they share similar characteristics. Both are courageous; both fight ferociously and are unconquerable in battle. This thing to which the first object is compared is to be understood in some “transferred” sense. In that sense, David is a lion.

Many authorities advance the notion that the use of metaphor can generate new insights and provide new perspectives. The following examples may suffice to support this contention. Ortony (1975, p. 45) argues for their long tradition as teaching/learning devices:

Metaphors, and their close relatives, similes and analogies, have been used as teaching devices since the earliest writings of civilized man. The dialogues of Plato are full of them; . . . there is the cave metaphor to The Republic designed to illuminate various levels of knowledge, The Bible is another good source of metaphor, arid, of course, metaphor is the stock-in-trade of poets and writers. The widespread use of metaphor in even the earliest ‘teaching texts’ however, suggests that . . . metaphor is an essential ingredient of communication and consequently of great educational value.

N. L. Smith (1981, p. 25) concludes that “the utility of metaphors can be viewed as fully established as a heuristic device: a teaching/learning method which encourages a person to discover for him or herself solutions to their life experiences. What has not been established or developed is a comprehensible and employable methodology for utilizing and constructing therapeutic metaphors.”

Burke (1945, pp. 503-504) emphasizes the metaphor as an especially good technique for providing perspective.

Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of that, or the thatness of this. If we employ the word ‘character’ as a general term for whatever can be thought of as distinct (any thing, pattern, situation, structure, nature, person, object, act, role, process, event, etc.), then we can say that metaphor tells us something about one character as considered from the point of view of another character. And to consider A from the point of view of B is, of course, to use B as a perspective upon A.

Wallace (1982, p. 32) describes the magical quality of metaphor: “Metaphors work in bewildering ways and do a variety of jobs, sometimes so completely that no conscious analysis can follow them. They may illustrate, explain, emphasize, heighten, communicate information or ideas, or carry a tome, feeling or attitude.”

Kopp (1971, p. 7) addresses the old philosophical question, “How do we know?” He answers the “how” by “knowing (the world) metaphorically.” He explains that we “depend on an intuitive grasp of situations, in which we are open to the symbolic dimensions of experience, opened to the multiple meanings that may all coexist, giving extra shades of meaning to each other.”

To give us a more lyrical look at metaphor, writing on the metaphors and parables of gurus, Kopp (1972, pp. 1718) defines metaphor as

a way of speaking in which one thing is expressed in terms of another, whereby this bringing together throws a new light on the character of what is being described . . . for our purposes we will take metaphor in the broad sense, as denoting any kind of comparison as a basis for the kind of illumination we call poetic.

The above examples are aimed to orient and acquaint you with the most acceptable—and, perhaps, most popular—theories of metaphor. It appears from a review of the literature that the foundation of metaphoric understanding is grounded in, or at least touches deeply upon, social, philosophical, and linguistic patterns of society, as well as the psychological domain. This being the case, familiarity with these foundations can be helpful to you as a clinician to fully incorporate a working understanding of metaphorical intervention into your therapy process.

2

Therapeutic Metaphor

A Special Use of Language

Language is vitally metaphorical.

—Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry”

The most fruitful and modern criticism is a rediscovery and recovery of the importance of metaphor.

—Clench Brooks, Irony as a Principle of Structure

All our truth, or all but a few fragments, is won by metaphor.

—C. S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays

Metaphor, as a therapeutic tool, is a concept borrowed from many ancient and modern disciplines whose practitioners have pondered its meaning, use, and contribution for centuries. While philosophers have been speculating about the nature of metaphor since at least the time of Aristotle, the psychotherapeutic community only recently began to seriously reinvestigate the subject matter. An increasing amount of research and investigation has been conducted since the late 1980s in an attempt to define metaphor, determine its function, locate its academic domain and articulate its construction.

Although it happens that any meaning can be expressed precisely and accurately in a direct way, as a function of the communicator’s abilities, I believe that once the same message is communicated metaphorically, we are dealing in another dimension. To illustrate this point, I propose two descriptions of a person accepting a bribe. The first is a fairly clear and articulate expression of a direct communication. The second produces equality that brings the listener into that new dimension.

Even as I was accepting the money, I knew I was in for grave consequences. I really understood at the deepest level what a terrible mistake I was making and yet I took the money anyway.

I could feel the barbed hook slipping down into my mouth. Suddenly, and before I could do a thing about it, I felt a violent jolt that set the hook deep into my jaw. I was hooked and wriggling helplessly from another man’s pole.

Something happens to transform the meaning and it becomes understood, sometimes dramatically, differently. Differently, in that a feeling, emotion, and an affective state are produced that influences one’s outlook or relatedness to the issue being considered. The metaphor engenders this affective state that joins with the cognitive component. The client thus obtains an alternate frame of referenc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Understanding Metaphor
• Chapter 2: Therapeutic Metaphor
• Chapter 3: Milton H. Erickson, et al.
• Chapter 4: The Metaphorical Framework
• Chapter 5: A Model for Original Metaphor
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• References