Enacting Metaphors in Systemic Collaborative Therapy

Summary

Metaphors are effective therapeutic tools because they connect to action words, allowing clients to explore their embodiment and agency. This paper develops a dialogical-enactive account, arguing that metaphors work through participatory sense-making within linguistic dialogue, not through explicit performances. Analyzing examples from therapy with adolescents, the authors show how metaphors enact change in shared communication, drawing on enactive views of language as embodied interaction where talking is a form of doing.

Study at a glance

Abstract

What makes metaphors good therapeutic tools? In this paper, we provide an answer to this question by analyzing how metaphors work in systemic collaborative therapeutic practices. We look at the recent embodied, enactive and ecological proposals to metaphors, and provide our own, dialogical-enactive account, whereby metaphors are tools for enacting change in therapeutic dialogs. We highlight the role of enacting metaphors in therapy, which is concerned with how one uses the metaphors in shared process of communication. Our answer is that metaphors serve as good tools for connecting to action words, through which the client’s embodiment and agency can be explored. To illustrate our view, we analyze two examples of enacting metaphors in therapeutic engagements with adolescents. Our enactive proposal to metaphors is different from others as it does not rely on engaging in explicit performances but stays within a linguistic dialog. We take metaphoric engagement as an act of participatory sense-making, unfolding in the interaction. This insight stems from enactive ways of thinking about language as a process accomplished by embodied agents in interaction, and seeing talking also as a form of doing.

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