Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy

The aim of the Aeolian Mode is to release creative energy by freeing an individual from the restrictive legacy of the past. Taking Bachelard's paradox "But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface" as a paradigm, the book presents the therapeutic possibilities inherent in metaphor and image whereby patients are enabled to tell their story. Authenticity and meaning are enhanced as unconscious and conscious material become integrated.

'The joint ticket of Murray Cox's story-telling clinical style, with his rich literary allusions and Alice Theilgaard's wide background knowledge of the harder strands of academic and clinical psychology, with its neurological substrates, provides what is needed for a creative and more balanced synthesis for the vote-catching reader who would need to realize that he or she is taking up not just one book to read and re-read, but a comprehensive syllabus of exciting new reading in a neglected shadow area.'

- Group Analysis

'It is a wonderfully good read. It will carry engaged and attending readers into extensions of their own styles in psychotherapy, whatever their theoretical base ... Associative reverberations allow the therapist to "wait and witness" until the moment comes when a mutative metaphor can touch the depths before it stirs the surface.'

- American Journal of Psychiatry

'This book will add a new dimension to the work of analytical therapists, provided they are not too steeped in theoretical orthodoxy.'

- British Journal of Psychiatry

'The book shows how literary material may be incorporated within the working situation of a therapist: it does not use psychoanalytic concepts reductively to explain the workings of literature. Mutative Metaphors demonstrates for the reader- whether from the psychoanalytic or the literary field - the value of associativeness as a complex cognitive function not merely a decorative one.'

- British Journal of Psychotherapy

'This book will endure, because it is both theoretically well-grounded and innovative.'

- Psykolog Nyt

'It seems to me one of the most significant theological essays we are likely to see for a good while and I shall be recommending it to my students as such. I am personally genuinely grateful for such a blend of clinical/narrative detail and imaginative exploration.'

- Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

'This is one of the most penetrating books known to me on the nature and power of poetic images, and one might add one of the most illuminating studies of Shakespeare's use of images... In this period in which a nadir of trivialization of language and an impoverishment of images has surely been reached, a look into these depths where `The worst is not/So long as we can say This is the worst' might be salutary.'

- Kathleen Raine

'This is an important book. The central ideas, theoretical formulations, and practical clinical suggestions are original, co-ordinating much established knowledge. It is an exciting contribution to the development of what might be called "imaginative psychotherapy".

- Robert F Hobson

'This may well be the first textbook of psychopoetics.'

- Noel Cobb