ABSTRACT
A further principle of process might be phrased as: Speak poetically, rather than prosaically, for maximum impact.2 Of course, much of therapeutic discourse is necessarily practical, descriptive and representationalÐstaying close to the language of everyday life (and of the client) in order to intelligibly engage the mundane realities of the client's life world. But a therapy that does not at least occasionally lift above this to highlight or offer a less literal, but richly imagistic depiction of the client's problem, position or possibilities fails in Kelly's (1977) basic charge to transcend the obvious, that is, not merely to map current realities, but rather to foster their transformation by casting them in fresh and ®gurative terms. Listening to Kelly's tapes of therapy with a formal and isolated client during my graduate school years, I was struck by his frequent use of highly poetic and evocative language, as when he would confront the client with a comment like, ``And so here is the man, the man in the hollow sphere . . . ,'' as a prompt for deepening beyond the litany of weekly complaints that kept the client ®xed in his present unsatisfying relational patterns.
