Metaphor, Emotion and Meaning - Poetic Truth in the Therapeutic Conversation

<p dir="ltr">The therapeutic conversation moves progressively towards higher levels of experiential and interpersonal complexity and delicacy realised in more complex grammatical and semantic structures and processes. Like ‘glances’ and ‘twitches’ certain words also form patterns of ‘acquired meaning’ (Hobson, 1985) as constellations of metaphors tied together by their semantic similarities. Their convergence on the generic move of play expands the semantic field giving license to their potential use in moving the language up into more semantically complex instances of the text. That these can be shown to be textually motivated processes and not mere random decorations of speech, would make them eligible as ‘minute particulars’ of a more highly integrated narrative of self (Meares, 2012). The aim of this analysis is to establish evidence in support of tensile metaphors as worthy of the ‘symbolic attitude’.</p><p dir="ltr">My main focus in this dissertation is thus on the ‘minute particulars’ of the word and wordings, or more specifically, the increasingly more complex ways meaning is realised in the therapeutic conversation¹. What I am proposing is another way of looking at these ‘verbal statements’ not as one ‘minute particular’ but as many meanings created below the threshold of conscious awareness – and ‘beyond the typical threshold of human powers for tracking’ (Butt et al, 2014: 295).</p><p dir="ltr">As instances of complex meanings, tensile metaphors are also akin to symbolic representations of the text. In this sense, they are figures of the imminent textual consistencies instantiating contextual renewal and thereby propelling the change process forward and beyond the habits of entanglement. In other words, they are instances similar to ‘making strange’ (Shklovsky, 1919/2015) or ‘de-automatization’ (Mukařovský, 1977), textual realisations illuminating the material and semantic field of the immediate interpersonal experience. In this way, I suggest, they function to deepen and strengthen the patient’s and therapist’s sense of ‘analogical fit’.</p>