Sensing and Making Sense: Embodying Metaphor in Relational-Centered Psychotherapy

Abstract

The focus of this article is the use of metaphor in psychotherapy. I start with a selective review of the relevant psychotherapeutic literature. In practice, metaphors are used to represent metaphorical images that can clarify or interpret experience; metaphorical stories can be used playfully to elaborate understandings and provide new healing narratives. Next I introduce my embodied relational-centered way of being in my psychotherapy practice, highlighting the metaphors I typically fall back on. Three case examples illustrate the process of how, through metaphor, therapists sense and make sense of their clients' worlds and also how their clients make sense of these interventions. The value of engaging metaphors creatively and reflexively is emphasized, as various meanings of metaphors are often not self-evident. They need to be played with and worked through, both in dialogue and reverie. And they need to be seen in the broader context of individuals' histories, the therapeutic relationship, and the wider culture. The point that metaphors go beyond visual image to engage the different senses in multiple relational ways is highlighted. Although metaphors may be understood as being a function of language, in practice they arise through embodied intersubjective experiencing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No conflict of interest has arisen with this research. I give special thanks to each person whose story I have used for the gifts of our shared journeys and for giving me permission to reproduce them here. My husband, Mel Wilder, also needs a special acknowledgment in helping me find my voice through his wisdom, encouragement, and challenge. I'm also grateful to Ken Evans, my mentor and supervisor, for his ongoing support, teachings and inspiration. Finally, I am grateful to Professor Maria Gilbert and Katherine Murphy, editors of the British Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, for allowing me to reproduce parts of the Jayne case study, #2, from Finlay (2012).

Notes

¹He charged about the place like a bull in a china shop is a simile and not a metaphor, linguistically speaking. The associated metaphor (and image) would be he was a bull in a china shop. The metaphor refers to a state of being, rather than a straightforward comparison. Further linguistic distinctions can be found in Witztum, van der Hart, and Friedman (1988).

²I work as an existential-phenomenological and relationally-oriented Integrative Psychotherapist (Finlay, in press).

³The authors have developed their thesis in a number of further publications including Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1990) and Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Taking a cognitive linguistic perspective, they emphasize how the way people think (metaphorically) influences their experience. Although this goes some way to acknowledging embodied everyday action, mind is still largely centred in the brain. With my more phenomenological orientation, I give primacy to embodied experience.

⁴My practice of Integrative Psychotherapy is based predominantly on existential-phenomenological theory (Heidegger, 1927/1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962), in association with other relational and developmental models of therapy: dialogical gestalt theory (Hycner & Jacobs, 1995), intersubjectivity theory (Stolorow, Brandchaft, & Atwood 1995), and relational psychoanalysis (Mitchell & Aron, 1999).

⁵The description of my practice that follows is replete with metaphors and I italicize some of the more significant ones.

⁶Pushing the metaphorical theme, I could equally talk about the relationship producing the analytical third subject (Ogden, 1994) where I-ness (myself as subject) and they-ness (other as subject) is turned into we-ness.

⁷I am playing here, and taking liberties with Merleau-Ponty's (1964/1968) own original formulation of the body as sensible and as sentient (a distinction he previously called objective vs. phenomenal body).

⁸I am grateful to each of my clients for so generously giving me permission to reproduce their stories. The names given in the case studies are all pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. Some biographical and demographic details have been either omitted or changed to minimize exposure.

⁹I have taken the liberty here of paraphrasing Alex's story. I am quite sure that I have not done justice to the original, but in her feedback to me on sharing the case study she expressed appreciation for my efforts and the reminder of our work at this time.

¹⁰In some Far Eastern cultures, it is possible that Alex would be seen as a good, dutiful daughter, wife, and mother. In the Western and psychotherapy cultures, the idea of being a people pleaser carries with it some judgment. Alex—a White, middle-class, English woman—had internalized this more critical version.

¹¹The idea of multiple selves (subjectivities) is contested and understood differently across different modalities and subcultures. Traditional humanistic theory champions the idea of a private, unique, authentic, core self; postmodern variants celebrate plurality. Psychoanalytic theory accepts each person as being psychologically made up of unconsciously introjected parts of others, and social constructionist approaches the selves that emerge relationally in different contexts. For more discussion of this descriptive-epistemic category, see Rowan and Cooper (1999).

¹²In my work as an existential-phenomenological and relationally oriented therapist, I aim to enter a therapeutic encounter open to new understandings—to be empathically open to the client and what he or she is presenting in the here-and-now. It is important to try to respond to what is emerging in the relationship and not import prior assumptions or theory in the first instance; see Finlay (2014).

¹³Gendlin argues that what comes from the inward experiencing and bodily-sensed edge of awareness has a special intricacy, one that distinguishes it from the results of simply being in touch with body sensations:

Initially the felt bodily sense is ambiguous and opaque but then words, an image or a shift is experienced. There is a sensation of a physical change and new awareness, insight or solutions arise. (See www.focusing.org)

¹⁴For Thomas Ogden, a relational psychoanalyst, reverie includes images, phrases, tunes, reflections, daydreams, fantasies, bodily sensations, etc. that run through one's mind. He recommends consciously focusing on that stream of consciousness to possibly reveal unconscious dimensions (Ogden, 1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linda Finlay

Linda Finlay is a practising existential Integrative Psychotherapist (UKCP registered) and she teaches both psychology and qualitative research methodology at the Open University. She also teaches, supervises, and mentors psychotherapy students in training in institutions across Europe including at the Scarborough Psychotherapy Institute and the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling in the UK. She has acted as a visiting Professor for a number of universities including contributing to the Masters of Psychotherapy course in Novi Sad, Serbia. Her particular research interest is in applying hermeneutic phenomenological, relational and reflexive approaches to exploring the lived experience of disability and trauma. She has published widely, being best known for her textbooks on psychosocial occupational therapy and qualitative research. Her two most recent books are published by Wiley and are research oriented: Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world and Relational-centred research for psychotherapists (co-authored with Ken Evans). Her latest book, due to be published in September 2015, is entitled: Relational Integrative Psychotherapy: Process and Theory in Practice (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley).