Metaphor in Psychotherapy: A Descriptive and Prescriptive Analysis by Dennis Tay (Ed.)

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Notes

¹ In his concluding chapter, Tay acknowledges that it is necessary to conduct quantitative analysis on the use of metaphor in psychotherapy in order to substantiate present claims related to its uniqueness in this regard (p. 177). While the author asserts that “the increasing sophistication of corpora management and quantitative methodologies” should enable us to “capture patterns of metaphor use,” I’m not so sure. Obtaining a representative sample of psychotherapy transcripts to input as corpus, for example, is no easy feat. In his book, Tay discusses a number of psychotherapy sessions which operate under the practice of ‘metaphor therapy’ (Kopp, 1995). While transcripts from this framework are interesting to explore, given the therapists’ deliberate and strategic use of metaphor, inclusion of them within a corpus would undoubtedly bias any comparison with everyday speech. Another complication of quantitative analysis lies in the difficulty of metaphor identification: one needs a systematic way to distinguish related tropes like allegory, symbol, analogy and simile from metaphor and perhaps also a method to distinguish spontaneous metaphor from deliberate metaphor (see Pragglejaz Group (2007) and Steen et al. (2010) for approaches to metaphor identification).

² A discourse metaphor is a stable metaphorical mapping that functions as a framing device within a particular discourse or over a certain period of time. The metaphor is a framing device in the sense that the source domain (a journey) affects the representation and structure of the target domain (therapy).

³ Tay gives a “novel characterization of discourse markers [such as you know and I mean] as a type of signaling/tuning device” (p. 40). While this classification meshes with some early discussions of discourse markers, it is worth noting that recent work within Relevance Theory gives a rather different analysis of these expressions (Blakemore, 2002).