Finding the middle ground between therapist-centred and client-centred metaphor research in psychotherapy

People traditionally view metaphor as a kind of language play where one thing is described in terms of another for literary or rhetorical effect, as when Shakespeare famously wrote Juliet is the sun. In the past decades, however, psychologists and linguists have put forward a very different cognitive theory which claims that metaphors in language reflect a fundamental cognitive tendency to understand one concept in terms of another (Gibbs, 2013; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). This potential link between language and conceptualisation has motivated some psychotherapists to theorise how metaphors could be used to explore and possibly change clients’ feelings, values, attitudes, and behaviours (Wickman, Daniels, White, & Fesmire, 1999).