A Love of Things Irreconcilable: The Narration of Metaphor in Child Psychotherapy

When I first came to this field I did not know that I would spend the prime years of my life tracing the visionary company of metaphor. I did not know that I would enter a sadly broken world in which children who live painful lives are able to communicate the felt meaning of their experience by the creation of an elaborate emotional entanglement with an adult—an entanglement built up largely out of poetic imagery and storytelling. In this paper I will describe some of the ways in which childhood metaphors and the narratives they inhabit come to affect the therapist, the child, and the therapeutic process. I will propose that the child can make use of three very different aspects of metaphor in order to fine-tune adults. First, I will describe the child's use of the searing, penetrating power of metaphor, which can effectively take one's breath away and reach deep within the viscera of the adult to rouse the physical sensations of emotion. Second, I will depict the child's ability to use metaphoric communications to induce an altered, almost hypnotic state in an adult companion. In this hazy but suggestive state the adult is highly receptive to imaginative transmissions from the child's mental life. And last, I will explore the kind of play in which adults resuscitate their old childhood capacity for horsing around, pretending, inventing, and making believe, where the surface emotional tone is all about mutual entertainment.

Once children have utilized these attributes of metaphoric play to bring into being the quality of interaction that they seek, then the therapeutic exchange can begin. Together adult and child can then avail themselves of the myriad properties of poetic imagery in order to construct unforeseen imaginings that will in turn steer the child toward new habits of being.

Sometimes when we work with children a metaphor is presented to us in a fleeting antic moment, gone in a flash and barely caught in passing. In