“Dizziness of Freedom”: Anxiety Disorders and Metaphorical Meaning-making

ABSTRACT

Would metaphors used in the context of psychotherapy by people who experience various forms of anxiety disorders differ from those used by people who experience stress? We investigated this question with the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), a theory of meaning-making developed within the synthetic new discipline of cognitive semiotics. The analysis of a sample of ten transcripts of psychotherapy sessions concerning the topic of anxiety, and a comparable sample concerning stress, showed a significantly stronger proportion of conventionalized metaphors in the stress sample, and a marginally significant difference in the number of innovative metaphors in the anxiety sample. These results suggest that lived experience of an anxiety disorder or another form of maladaptive anxiety affects metaphorical meaning-making, and manifests itself in spontaneous metaphor use. Furthermore, as a result of the conceptual and the empirical investigations of the topic, we propose novel theoretical and operational definitions of the notion of metaphoricity.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we wish to thank the American Psychological Association for allowing us to use excerpts from PsycTherapy database both in the presented study and in publications. We wish to express gratitude to Anna W. Gustafsson and Khatia Chikhladze Woxell, for providing very helpful comments on Kalina Moskaluk’s MA thesis “Dizziness of Freedom: The influence of maladaptive anxiety on metaphorical meaning-making and the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM),” which eventually led to this article. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the journal for many insightful comments that helped us improve the article substantially.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ It is worth noting that while in other theories of metaphor the term “iconicity”has seldom been present, authors have adopted analogous notions, such as “ontological correspondences” (Lakoff, 1993) or “transparency of metaphor” (Müller, 2017).

² It must be noted that the independent variable in this study is not the experience of the state anxiety or the state stress, but rather the presence or absence of an anxiety disorder. In 8 of the sessions included in the anxiety sample it was explicitly stated that the psychotherapy recipients were diagnosed with anxiety disorders – either in the descriptions of the video recordings, or as the index terms attributed to these sessions in the database. In the descriptions of the remaining two it was stated that the subjects suffered from physiological, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms of anxiety or expressed concerns related to anxiety. On the other hand, in the descriptions of the sessions in the stress sample nothing was stated about the subjects being diagnosed with anxiety disorders, nor were any of these sessions indexed with the term “anxiety disorders”. The difference between the two samples can thus be assumed to provide the independent variable, which allows to investigate differences between metaphors produced by individuals experiencing anxiety disorders according to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013) definition, and individuals who do not.

³ The interpretations in question were grounded in the analyst’s knowledge of the discourse. However, the expressions subjected to the metaphor identification procedure as presented in Appendix A are indeed devoid of any context to obscure any identifying information, for ethical reasons.

⁴ All examples used in this article from example (5) onwards are taken from the dataset used for this study. The codes used for referring to therapists and clients throughout this article consist of a letter “S” or “T” signifying subjects (clients) and therapists respectively, a number (numbers 1–10 signify therapy transcripts included in the anxiety sample, and 11–20 signify transcripts included in the stress sample). The letters F and M at the end of a code signify the client’s gender.

⁵ A critic could say that “X is like Z and not like Z” is not self-contradictory since there are always ways in which two things are both similar and different. But we would reply that such an expression is at least anomalous by violating Gricean maxims of Quantity and Manner. The reason: it is not informative, and in principle tautologous to say, e.g., “Bats are like birds and not like birds”.

⁶ Unlike in the identification procedure, the categorization was performed only by the primary analyst. While we recognize potential problems associated with relying on one analyst’s coding decisions, we argue that inter-rater reliability check is less important in this case, as the categorization criteria are quite explicit.