The play of metaphor

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.