ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 we discussed Erickson's use of what Rossi termed "two-level communication" (Erickson & Rossi, 1976/1980) as a means of communicating simultaneously with a patient's conscious and unconscious minds: While the conscious mind was occupied with the literal content of a story, joke, pun, or analogy, the unconscious mind was receiving carefully chosen suggestions that had been .. interspersed" throughout the verbalization. We would like to expand upon this model by proposing a type of three-level communication that adds a powerful therapeutic dimension to the storytelling metaphor via a process of sensory interweaving. In presenting a therapeutic metaphor to the
child, the storyline communicates the first (conscious) level of meaning; the interspersed suggestions communicate the second (unconscious) level of meaning; and a process of sensory interweaving communicates a third, out-of-conscious level of meaning. This model of three-level communication within the context of a therapeutic metaphor could be depicted as follows:
As the first level of communication, the storyline occupies the child's conscious mind by presenting an interesting plot. We have already presented various ways of generating a storyline as the basis of a therapeutic metaphor. In Chapter 3 we discussed the six basic ingredients of storywriting that can be used as milestones in the development of a metaphorical storyline: presenting a metaphorical conflict that matches the child's problem, personifying unconscious processes via various characters, integrating parallel learning situations of previous success, presenting a metaphorical crisis that serves as a turning point of resolution, developing a new sense of identification, and culminating with a celebration. We also summarized several different sources of material for the storyline: preordained themes, fairy tale motifs, the child's own imagination, the therapist's own real-life experiences, and the therapist's functional/imaginative associations.
