The play of metaphor

Abstract

This paper contributes to post-crisis, social constructionist psychological literature addressing mainstream psychology's failure to engage in a relevant way with people's everyday experiences. We work with a narrative psychology paradigm, focussing specifically on the element of metaphor as a useful way to come to terms with how our 'selves' and our interactions with others are sociolinguistically fashioned. We discuss an article by Ian Parker, in which personal accounts illuminate the linguistic embeddedness of psyches. To illustrate the value of metaphor for locating, and potentially transforming, interpretations in daily encounters, we consider a text by Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré.Social science's 'crisis' , which began to take shape more than half a century ago, represents a turning-point for psychology. Concerns voiced at this time critiqued the discipline's theoretical and practical distancing from the people in whom we were ostensibly interested, and have led psychological research and practice in interesting new directions. One approach that emerged from the crisis is a narrative psychology paradigm that incorporates epistemological assumptions valuing a contextual, sociolinguistic characterisation of reality in terms relevant for life stories. We focus on the specific narrative element of metaphor, examining its usefulness for helping us understand how language delimits conceptualisations of our world, our 'selves' and our everyday experiences. We discuss articles by Ian Parker, and Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré, and suggest that analysing their accounts Requests for further information should be directed to Mandy Morgan,