Metaphors in Mind: Transformation through Symbolic Modelling
James Lawley and Penny Tompkins
The Developing Press Company, 2000.
ISBN 0-9538751-0-5
Reviewed by Mario Rinvolucri
Who is this book for? This is the answer to be found in the book's blurb:
What
do you do as a therapist, teacher doctor or manager when your client,
student, patient or colleague says: " It's like I'm hitting my head
against a brick wall," "I've got a knot in my stomach",or "I'm looking
for the right path to take? Metaphors in Mind describes how to
give individuals the opportunity to discover how their symbolic
perceptions are organised, what needs to happen for these to change and
how they can transform as a result.
Based
on David Grove's pioneering therapeutic approach and use of Clean
Language, symbolic modelling is an emergent systemic and iterative way
of facilitating the psychotherapeutic process.
Are
the authors right to feel that the book will speak only to the bizarre
sub-group of "process" professionals mentioned above, to whit managers,
medical doctors, shrinks and instructors? My
feeling is that that the discoveries shared between these covers will
interest anybody who works in a "helping/intruding/ self-comforting /
professions, to whit:
shamans
priests of all kinds
social workers
nurses
probation officers as well as the four professions mentioned above.
The book could well interest people working in the "interrogation professions"
and people that come to mind are:
journalists (especially TV and Radio)
police
sociological research interviewers
Job interviewers
military extractors of information (i.e. on the US Guantanamo Bay base) etc.
Anybody
working as a composer, lighting artist, playwright, painter or any
other of the so-called creative jobs will treasure this book for its
insight into the huge lake of individual's sub-conscious mind.
Linguists
from George Lakoff to Chomsky, via Ron Carter and Mike McCarthy will
delight in this book, if it were to come their way.
I
could now go into the intellectual explanations Lawley and Tompkins
offer of their new, Grovian way of working but I would prefer you to
listen to them at work with a client in a therapy situation (From page 253):
|
Th. And what would you like to have
happen?
|
Standard opening question
|
Cl: I'd like to have more energy because
I feel very tired.
Th: And you'd like to have more energy because you feel very tired. And when
you'd like to have more energy, that
more energy is like what?
|
Requests entry into metaphor
|
Cl: It's like I'm behind a castle door.
Th: And it's like you're behind a castle
door. And when behind a castle
door, what kind of castle door is
that castle door?
Cl: A huge castle door that's very thick,
very old, with studs, very heavy.
|
Asks to attend to the nature of the perceived symbol, thus developing its form.
|
Th: And a huge castle door that's very
thick, very old, with studs, very heavy. And when a huge castle door is very .
thick, very old, with studs, very heavy,
is there anything else about that huge
castle door?
Cl: I can't open it and I get very, very
tired trying to open it.
|
Develops further- if the door has five attributes, maybe it has more
|
Th: And a huge castle door that's very
thick, very old, with studs, very heavy. And when a huge castle door is very .
thick, very old, with studs, very heavy,
is there anything else about that huge
castle door?
Cl: I can't open it and I get very, very
tired trying to open it.
|
Invites client to notice the nature of the relationship between perceiver and perceived.
|
|
Th: And like struggling on your own, not
getting anywhere and banging your head
on a wall. And as it takes a lot of energy
banging your head on a wall, what kind
wall is that wall?
|
Develops form of new symbol.
|
|
Cl: A castle wall of thick granite and I get
very frustrated and very angry.
|
Client's attention shifts to the perceiver.
|
|
Th: And a castle wall of thick granite and
you get very frustrated and very angry.
And when very frustrated and very
angry, where is that very frustrated
and very angry?
|
Locating " very frustrated and very angry" will determine if this is one or two feelings and start to develop their form
|
Cl: In here ( touches solar plexus region)
Th: And when in here, whereabouts in here?
Cl: Exactly in here. Hollow. Full of
darkness.
|
Still locating
|
|
Th: And exactly in here. Hollow. Full of
darkness. And when hollow is full of
darkness, is there anything else about
that darkness?
|
Develops form of new symbol
|
Cl: It's very dry.
Th: And it's very dry. And when darkness
is very dry , its very dry like what?
|
Still developing.
|
|
Cl: It's dry like a desert.
|
Desert in hollow in body in castle
|
etc…… ( the above is less that one seventh of the whole interview)
The central principle of this method is to help the client to explore her own
sub-conscious via careful elicitation of relevant metaphors.
Freud invited the client to reach into the sub-conscious through a process of
free association and via analysis of dream images.
Moreno
got people to move beyond and below the confines of conscious awareness
by getting them to act out scenes from their present, their past and
their future. His way developed into psychodrama.
I firmly believe that Grove, Lawley and Tompkins have found a new road out from the narrow confines of conscious awareness.
My
enthusiasm for their technique is based on personal experience. When
Judy Baker, one of their trainees, supervised my teaching and teacher
training last summer, she sometimes used metaphor elicitation to help
me bust through a block in my understanding of what may have been going
on in my classes. Several times I was able to see to the bottom of
things, that on the conscious surface, baffled me completely.
How can we use the Grovian techniques in our language teaching? Here are a series
of question without answers?
- What would be the effect of using the text quoted above as a listening comprehension, with all its iterative, hypnotic qualities?
- What use could be made by a story-teller of the idea of starting many sentences
with "and"?
- Could a student get into role as a major character in a literary work, or in a film,
and could she then be interviewed in a metaphor eliciting way? How might this
help students delve into the character's mind and heart at deeper levels?
- Could students be asked to read half of the transcript quoted above and then
go on to write about the problem, in role as the "client".
- Could students be asked to read a page of the transcript above and then carry
the interview on for another page or two?
None of these ideas have been tried out in class, yet.
If you do try any of them, please let HLT know and let the authors know.
