Article Discourse Studies 13(1) 1–21 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1461445610387736 http://dis.sagepub.com Corresponding author: Dennis Tay, Department of English, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. Email: dennis.tay@gmail.com Therapy is a journey as a discourse metaphor Dennis Tay University of Otago, New Zealand Abstract Although much has been written about the use of metaphors during psychotherapy sessions, the complementary question of how the therapeutic process might itself be metaphorically conceptualized is seldom asked. This article adopts the notion of ‘discourse metaphors’ (Zinken et al., 2008) and provides a case study of the metaphor THERAPY IS A JOURNEY across various levels of psychotherapeutic discourse, including the formulation of theoretical constructs, pedagogical frameworks, and transcripts of actual therapeutic talk. I show how the inherent meaning stability as well as flexibility afforded by conceptual metaphors renders them particularly suitable for conveying a necessary sense of theoretical continuity across the levels, while accommodating variations according to situated discourse objectives within each level. Answering calls for metaphor research to be more practically relevant, I also suggest how the present approach can contribute to the increasing therapeutic concern with establishing ‘feedback’ across the different participatory levels of psychotherapy. Keywords conceptual metaphor, discourse metaphor, metaphor variation, psychotherapy 1. Introduction Motivated by the possibility that metaphor use could benefit psychotherapeutic practice, linguists and therapists investigate how, what and when metaphors are deployed by ther- apists and patients. While describing particularistic metaphors used in therapy is impor- tant, relatively little attention has been paid to how the abstract therapeutic process itself might be metaphorically conceptualized. This article adopts the notion of ‘discourse metaphors’ (hereafter DMs), defined as ‘relatively stable metaphorical mappings that function as a key framing device within a particular discourse over a certain period of time’ (Zinken et al., 2008: 364), and provides a case study of how therapy is metaphorically