'Tensile Metaphor' and the conversational model: a language-based approach to the treatment of complex trauma

By placing language at the centre of the therapeutic process, Hobson and Meares distinguished their Conversational Model (CM) of psychotherapy from models rooted in the traditions of either psychoanalysis or the behavioural and cognitive sciences. Unlike clinicians trained in these traditions, the CM clinician is oriented not towards the content of the therapeutic conversation, but rather towards its form. It is in the patient's choice of words, their prosodic qualities and syntactic structure - measurable linguistic phenomena - that the CM clinician finds the subjective indices of self. My aim in this thesis is to first explore the theoretical, philosophical, and scientific foundations for the centrality of language and metaphor in the theory and practice of the CM, and then to look specifically at the role of creative or 'tensile' metaphors in facilitating the development of self. I argue, based on the science, that as analogical relatedness, the 'picturing' of the patient's feeling states, nurtures the integration of right brain-based systems responsible for emotional self-regulation and the ability to tolerate ambiguity, it ipso facto develops in the patient the capacity and imagination for creative metaphoric comprehension and production, a capacity greatly diminished by early traumatic experiences. This increased capacity for creating and grasping metaphoric meaning, I argue, extends and enriches the patient's subjective life and thus deepens the intersubjective experience of analogical fit between patient and therapist.