Re‐Imagining Family Therapy: Choosing the Metaphors We Live By

Abstract

This paper examines the influence of dominant metaphors in everyday and professional language, and relates this theme to emerging concerns with the historically dominant metaphor in family therapy: the family viewed as a system. Increasing interest is being shown in the development of alternative metaphors, especially those based on aspects of language and literary practice e.g. conversation, discourse, rhetoric, narrative and text. However, the fundamental question remains: how do we choose the metaphors we wish to live by? To address this question, a journey into postmodernist cultural studies is made and the concept of the ethical‐poetical imagination is borrowed as a criterion for comparison and choice. From this vantage point, preferences for the metaphorical future of ‘postmodernist’ family therapy are expressed and explained.