The role of client-generated metaphors on in-session therapeutic processes /

Psychotherapy research indicates that metaphors are often used to express a client's meaningful experience. This study measured the impact of client-generated metaphors on in-session experiencing. The research question explored whether client-generated metaphor use would be associated with greater in-session experiencing as rated by the Experiencing Scale (EXP; Klein, Mathieu-Coughlan, & Kiesler, 1986). It was also asked whether metaphor use would increase the subsequent experiencing of a client. Forty-seven client-generated metaphor events were randomly selected from 47 psychotherapy transcripts of clients in therapy with counsellors-in-training. For each metaphor event, a pre-metaphor and post-metaphor client utterance was selected. A total of 140 utterances were compared using a repeated-measure analysis of variance. Results indicate that client-generated metaphors are not significantly different from pre-metaphor or post-metaphor client utterances. The role of language and the clinical importance of metaphor use in psychotherapy were discussed