Suchergebnisse

This article explores the relationship between metaphors and emotion in the context of adolescent distress and psychotherapeutic treatment. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study of Mexican American adolescents receiving outpatient treatment for a variety of emotional and behavioral problems, the article examines what I call "prescribed" metaphors deployed in mainstream, manualized child and adolescent Cognitive Behavioral Therapies commonly used in mainstream clinical contexts. I explore the models of emotion communicated to youth by one such metaphor, youth responses to this metaphor, and the potential implications for young people as they take up the underlying models and affective practices embedded in the metaphor. Specifically, I examine how youth respond to messages about emotion metacognition and emotion regulation embedded in a metaphor that equates feelings with temperatures that can be monitored and objectively measured. I find that youth are at once convinced that abstract knowledge about internal states is inherently valuable because it is linked to desired forms of personhood, but also concerned about the limits of technical metaphors to capture aspects of lived experience and the flattening and homogenization of affect that might accompany the practices such metaphors help to enact. I analyze alternative interpretations of prescribed metaphors as well as the spontaneous metaphors used by youth to talk about their emotions and experiences of distress, in an effort to think through the politics and poetics of emotion metaphors in the context of an evidence-based psychotherapy for young people.

Through the presentation and analysis of a prototypical mediumship narrative, this article shows how individuals initiated into the Candomblé religion of north-eastern Brazil come to alter their own self-narratives by learning and internalizing the cultural model for an established social/religious role: that of the medium. As individuals come to identify with this 'role model,' they are able to reinterpret their own life histories in terms of the model's structure and its symbolic content. This article also demonstrates how the social articulation and cognitive internalization of this new self-narrative act therapeutically, to foster a positive transformation in self-understanding that facilitates positive behavior.