ABSTRACT
What makes metaphors good therapeutic tools? In this paper, we provide an answer to this question by analyzing how metaphors work in systemic collaborative therapeutic practices. We look at the recent embodied, enactive and ecological proposals to metaphors, and provide our own, dialogical-enactive account, whereby metaphors are tools for enacting change in therapeutic dialogs. We highlight the role of enacting metaphors in therapy, which is concerned with how one uses the metaphors in shared process of communication. Our answer is that metaphors serve as good tools for connecting to action words, through which the client's embodiment and agency can be explored. To illustrate our view, we analyze two examples of enacting metaphors in therapeutic engagements with adolescents. Our enactive proposal to metaphors is different from others as it does not rely on engaging in explicit performances but stays within a linguistic dialog. We take metaphoric engagement as an act of participatory sense-making, unfolding in the interaction. This insight stems from enactive ways of thinking about language as a process accomplished by embodied agents in interaction, and seeing talking also as a form of doing.
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses different frameworks for understanding imagination and metaphor in the context of research on the imaginative skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In contrast to a standard linguistic framework, it advances an embodied and enactive account of imagination and metaphor. The paper describes a case study from a systemic therapeutic session with a child with ASD that makes use of metaphors. It concludes by outlining some theoretical insights into the imaginative skills of children with ASD that follow from taking the embodied-enactive perspective and proposes suggestions for interactive interventions to further enhance imaginative skills and metaphor understanding in children with ASD.
