Fairy tales,landscapes and metaphor in supervision: An exploratory study

Objective: Supervision is an important requirement for most health professionals and finding innovative and creative forms of ensuring safe and ethical practice are helpful to practitioners. This paper explores the use of fairy tales, mental landscapes and metaphors to illuminate the therapeutic and supervisory relationship. A therapy case study was used as reference. Design: The design was based on a grounded theory methodology and qualitative‐based collaborative meetings between professionals. Both researchers/participants were from different therapeutic backgrounds; drama therapy and integrative counselling. Findings: Two main themes emerged relating to the therapeutic process: (1) Using Archetypal themes in fairy tales to enhance the clarity of the therapeutic landscape; and (2) The facilitation of the sense system through the use of small objects to reconceptualise the therapeutic dynamic. Conclusion: The use of metaphor and small objects to explore retrospective therapeutic encounters can enhance the role of supervision by broadening the cognitive landscape of the therapist. Implications for the therapist/client and supervisor relationships are considered.     

The imagination of the body: The logic of imagination and the metaphor of therapeutic space in the therapeutic community of Thalassa House

In this paper the author discusses the metaphors of the community in Thalassa House, a therapeutic community in Hungary of which he is both the founder and leader.     

THE METAPHOR OF THE ARCHITECT IN DARWIN: CHANCE AND FREE WILL

In The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, published in 1868, Darwin used the metaphor of the architect to argue in favor of natural autonomy and to clarify the role of chance in his theory of adaptive change by variation and natural selection. In this article, I trace the history of this important heuristic instrument in Darwin's writings and letters and suggest that this metaphor was important to Darwin because it helps him to explain the role of chance, and gives an argument in favor of the free will.     

THE EXPLORATORY AND REFLECTIVE DOMAIN OF METAPHOR IN THE COMPARISON OF RELIGIONS

There has been a longstanding interest in discovering or uncovering resemblances among what are ostensibly diverse religious schemas by employing a range of methodological approaches and tools. However, it is generally considered a problematic undertaking. Jonathan Z. Smith has produced a large body of work aimed at explicating this and has tacitly based his model of comparison on metaphor, which is traditionally understood to connote similarity between two or more things, as based on a linguistic or pragmatic assessment. However, another possible approach is cognitive. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have championed the view of “conceptual metaphor,” which regards metaphor as being pervasive not only in language, but also in thought and action. Indeed, according to them, it basically structures our conceptual operations and hence views of the world through partially mapping knowledge across ontological domains, generally from the concrete to the abstract. I shall argue that a similar mechanism can fruitfully be applied to comparing religious schemas, as based on the postulated relationship between the domains of human and divine, physical and abstract, and as realized through expressions of journeying and reflection.     

From left to right: Processing acronyms referring to names of political parties activates spatial associations

In line with previous studies, showing that abstract concepts like “power” or “god” implicitly activate spatial associations, in the present study we hypothesized that spatial associations are coactivated during the processing of acronyms referring to names of political parties as well. In four studies, it was found that the reading of these acronyms was accompanied by the implicit activation of spatial left–right associations. That is, participants responded faster to left-wing parties by means of a left-hand button press and vice versa for right-wing parties (Experiments 1 to 3), and participants responded faster when a political acronym was presented at the side of the screen corresponding to the political orientation of the acronym (Experiment 4). Interestingly, a correlation was observed between the effect size for left-wing parties and participants' political preferences, suggesting that the reaction time effects reflect the perceived distance of a party to one's own political orientation. Together these findings indicate that spatial representations activated in response to political acronyms do not simply reflect lexical–semantic associations or spatial metaphors, but representations of parties' political orientation relative to one's own sociopolitical position.     

Understanding Sexual Revictimization of Women Through Metaphors: A Qualitative Research

The aim of this study was to contribute to the phenomenological understanding of revictimization through metaphors used by women when describing their revictimization experiences. Data were collected through in-depth semistructured interviews with 9 women regarding their repeated sexual victimization. Content analysis focused on metaphors used by the women when describing revictimization. Analysis of the metaphors revealed vulnerability in relation to the self and to interpersonal relationships. The metaphors relating to the self are portrayed through images of imprisonment, homelessness, contamination, and disability. Interpersonal relationships are described through the image of boundaries. These metaphors reflect duality: the profound need for security and the perception of boundaries as limiting and confining. Metaphors can be useful as a heuristic instrument for understanding women’s experience of the duality and the contradictions in coping with revictimization, and for intervention.     

为什么快乐在“上”，悲伤在 “下”? ——语篇阅读中情绪的垂直空间隐喻

以具有一定情境的语篇作为实验材料,采用引导范式和无关任务范式,探讨了“快乐是上,悲伤是下”这一情绪的垂直空间隐喻在语篇阅读中的心理现实性。实验1要求被试阅读情绪语篇后,对呈现在屏幕上方或下方的字母“F”或“J”进行判断。结果发现,被试阅读积极情绪语篇后对呈现在空间位置上方的字母反应更快,阅读消极情绪语篇后对呈现在空间位置下方的字母反应更快,表明语篇阅读中存在情绪的垂直空间隐喻的始源域向目标域映射的心理现实性。实验2要求被试阅读含有空间位移的语篇后对随机呈现在屏幕上方或下方的图片中面孔人物的性别进行判断。结果发现被试阅读含有在空间中向上移动的语篇后对积极情绪图片反应更快,阅读含有在空间中向下移动的语篇后对消极情绪图片的反应更快,说明语篇阅读中存在情绪的垂直空间隐喻的目标域向始源域映射的心理现实性。研究表明：语篇阅读中读者可以产生情绪的垂直空间隐喻,并且空间这一始源域和情绪这一目标域具有双向映射的性质。     

Hard Sell

In Japan, the ‘relay of life’ has become a common metaphor for organ transplantation. Its prevalence has owed much to the cultural construction of a breakthrough motif vis-à-vis Japan's first legally and publicly accepted transplant case in 1999. The media coverage of this event forged a specific imagery in which the relay of life model and a hopeful breakthrough message were inscribed. This breakthrough motif then developed into the general metaphor for transplant medicine in Japan.

Previous research has arguably ascribed the Japanese metaphor to the endeavour, by promoters of transplant medicine, to avoid invoking the Euro–American idea of a transplanted organ as a gift, in a culture that sees gift exchange (including organ transplantation with living donors) as a practice that takes place principally within the personalized network. However, this does not explain the relay metaphor per se, and is therefore an incomplete account. It is necessary to examine the reasons behind the choice of this specific metaphor, what the relay of life actually signifies, and how the metaphor was articulated and distributed.

This enquiry illuminates the aforementioned developing process of the relay metaphor, whilst also taking account of the then Japanese public debating discourse about transplant medicine vis-à-vis its metaphoric idiom in the English language, the ‘gift of life’. It demonstrates that the relay metaphor in Japan was not established through the deliberate efforts of those promoting transplantation, but rather was constructed via media coverage of a breakthrough case in 1999.     

On Wittgenstein’s Comparison of Philosophical Methods to Therapies

Abstract

Wittgenstein’s comparison of philosophical methods to therapies has been interpreted in highly different ways. I identify the illness, the patient, the therapist and the ideal of health in Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and answer four closely related questions concerning them that have often been wrongly answered by commentators. The results of this paper are, first, some answers to crucial questions: philosophers are not literally ill, patients of philosophical therapies are not always philosophers, not all philosophers qualify as therapists, the therapies are not necessarily to be thought of as psychological therapies and the ideal of health does not consist in the end of philosophy. Second, the paper shows that the comparison has had a misleading effect, because properties of therapies have been illegitimately projected onto the philosophical methods advanced by Wittgenstein.     

Ecclesiological Research and Natural and Human Sciences: Some Observations of an Unconventional Phenomenon

This article is motivated by the absence of published material dealing with the rapprochement between ecclesiology and the sciences. It presupposes that there is a need to broaden the scope of ecclesiological research in order to integrate into it theories and methods from the social and natural sciences. Ecclesiological research in this wider sense has as its object, church, as a broad concept. The article suggests a threefold aspect for ecclesiology, conceiving it as the ecclesiology of the researcher, and the ecclesiology of both the object and of the result of the research. Furthermore, its purpose is to identify transparent ecclesiological theories which are able to engage with and integrate scientific theories and methods. An inventory of examples of modes of collaboration used between ecclesiology and different sciences is then offered as an illustration of the context in which ecclesiology may integrate or relate to science in different ways. Finally, the article concludes that there is a need for further clarificatory research into the possibilities which exist for ecclesiology to be made more fully the science of being Christian in community or church.