In their root sense, metaphors transport meaning across ("phor" from pherein) and beyond ("meta") from one context to another.
A metaphor has the power to hold - in dialectical tension - two compared objects or phenomena which are both similar and different from one another.
Metaphors utilize imagery and affective, figurative associations which can sharpen and deepen thinking and understanding.
By introducing a new view and illuminating new dimensions of meaning, metaphors can bring about changes in culture, create a kind of semantic resonance, and stimulate both new insights and critique of old ideas. Metaphors help thought to break away from habit and tunnel vision. Metaphors help a person to reason from her own background of knowledge and experience toward the new and unknown.
THE FOLLOWING METAPHORS FOR COUNSELLING open up new ways of thinking about counselling and present tensions between old and new ways of construing the process of counselling.
Counselling as a garden
Counselling as a sanctuary
Counselling as a workshop for constructing self
Counselling as a communication space
Counselling as an opportunity for expanding personal freedom
Counselling as a genuine meeting
Counselling as the ground in the 'in-between'
Counselling as an opportunity for public reasoning
Counselling as a negotiated achievement
Counselling as a method for life planning
Counselling as a process for designing personal futures
Counselling as a shelter
Counselling as the birthplace for new capacity
Counselling as a social practice
Counselling as a safe forum for saying and hearing reasons of the mind, heart and body
Counselling as a co-construction project
Counselling as a meaning-making project
Counselling as a self-creating event
In the middle of life's road
I found myself in a dark wood.
. . . Dante, Divine Comedy
Copyright 2008