Trajectories #8: The Third Planet of Therapy: The Use of Metaphor in Clinical Practice

The Art of Conversation, Magritte (1963)

Introduction to the project — Trajectories

Trajectories is the newsletter of The Developmental Library, a community-led space for anyone moving through the world of developmental and lifespan psychology.

Every month we give voice to professionals and scholars who share their journey with authenticity: their everyday work, the tools they use, the resources they find valuable, the questions that still stay with them. We are not looking for linear careers or perfect answers — we are looking for situated experiences, plural viewpoints, diverse trajectories.

Psychologists, therapists, psychiatrists, researchers, lecturers, students: if you are passionate about psychology across the life course, this space is yours too.

The newsletters come out on the 23rd of every month. If you would like to contribute as Voice of the Month — or share resources, ideas, reflections — write by the 15th to thedevelopmentallibrary@gmail.com.

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Introduction to the month of August

In any psychological journey there can be moments when words are not enough to hold the experience, moments when the patient may feel the need to search for an image or a story to give shape to their lived experience. The psychologist can do the same: choosing words not only to explain but also to show, giving the patient back a clear, shareable image in which they can finally recognize themselves.

In this sense, metaphor is not a mere linguistic device but takes on a threefold value — communicative, representational and emotional. Metaphor works like a simultaneous translator: it brings into focus the deep origin of present suffering, it tunes the gaze of therapist and patient to a shared language, and it changes the way one looks at one's own situation, revealing possibilities that were previously invisible.

In this issue of the newsletter I will guide you through how symbolic language can actively enter our clinical practice, becoming a powerful engine of change.

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Tell us about your world of psychology - Dr. Chiara Fani

Hello! I am Dr. Chiara Fani, Clinical Psychologist (Register of Psychologists of Tuscany, no. 10653), currently training in Systemic-Relational Psychotherapy, with expertise in Criminology. On social media you can find me as @simbolicamente_, a space where I explore and share psychology starting from symbols.

My path stems from an interest that has never faded: understanding how clinical psychology concretely engages with society, institutions and the surrounding culture. A key step in my training was my internship at the Juvenile Court of Florence, in the field of civil and criminal juvenile justice and adoptions. That experience allowed me to deepen complex themes and gave rise to a profound interest in supporting families, protecting minors and, in particular, in the delicate journey of adoption and the search for origins as experienced by adopted children.

Later, working as an operator in a therapeutic community was fundamental in bringing me closer to the world of dual diagnoses and addictions, areas on which I now focus a large part of my private clinical practice.

The aspect I find most valuable in working with addictions and developmental fragilities is building a multidisciplinary network. Constantly collaborating and comparing notes with psychiatrists, child neuropsychiatrists, educators, social workers and many other professionals is an extraordinary resource: I strongly believe that integrating different perspectives and skills is an excellent way to offer complete and effective care and support.

Today, alongside my private practice, I have for two years now been running a corporate psychological support desk at a manufacturing company in Florence, bringing psychology directly into everyday and working life contexts. In my practice I bring together all of these experiences, integrating my criminological training with the systemic-relational approach. This allows me to maintain a complex outlook, a perspective that never isolates the individual but always welcomes them within their network of relationships and the contexts they come from.

The Third Planet of Therapy: why metaphor works in the clinic

«Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space» (Orson Scott Card)

My way of understanding the therapeutic process has its roots in a personal discovery made many years ago. During an art history class in high school, I came across the painting The Art of Conversation by Magritte (1963). In that canvas I found something I could not yet put into words: the sense that certain moments of deep conversation happen just as they do between the two figures in the painting, suspended in a point that belongs to neither of them individually, but exists only through the encounter with the Other. That painting entered my life even before my profession did, but only later, working in the therapy room, did I understand that it had already visually anticipated what I would live every day with my patients. Today, that visual intuition finds a precise metaphorical expression in a concept devised by Maurizio Andolfi and Claudio Angelo (1989): therapy as the “Third Planet.” A new territory, belonging neither to the therapist nor to the patient, which is born solely from their encounter and is co-constructed session after session. It is a metaphor with the power to capture, with the same immediacy as Magritte during that art class, the essence of the clinical experience.

It is thus precisely the metaphor of the Third Planet that introduces and makes this concept thinkable: the conscious experience of this shared therapeutic dimension becomes possible through contact with image and analogical representation. The power of this image captures and conveys a profound experience of emotional attunement, allowing therapist and patient to “experience” and inhabit that shared territory even before (or beyond) being able to explain its complexity through numerical-digital language (as defined by the Palo Alto school). In the clinic, then, metaphor is not a mere linguistic ornament, but the primary key of access to an otherwise ineffable reality.

Boscolo and Bertrando (1996) remind us that clinical reality emerges from language: capturing the patient's words, verbal expressions, analogies and linguistic redundancies makes it possible to offer new and unexpected images with which to view their story. The power of metaphor within therapeutic space is not merely a clinical intuition; it rests on substantial theoretical and empirical grounding. George Lakoff (2008), with his Neural Theory of Language, shows that metaphor is a genuine early cognitive and emotional structure. Together with Johnson (2022), Lakoff explained metaphor as a cognitively complex device based on the mapping of two conflicting domains, one that shapes every dimension of everyday life, allowing us to categorize our experiences and bring order to our thinking. A well-chosen image activates and coordinates different brain areas, linking the logical plane to the bodily and affective one. According to the philosopher Gert Malan, metaphor is the place where the true meaning of language is born: using a metaphor sets meaning in motion, preventing words and our lived experiences from remaining locked into a single rigid interpretation.

Furthermore, Littman (1985) points out that metaphor has the power to bypass psychic defenses: the use of analogical language allows the patient to approach protected emotional cores without having to force the lock of resistance. Vittorio Cigoli and Alberto Zatti (1992) note how the co-construction of a symbol offers a shared representation of the problem on which the therapeutic alliance is built, fostering a process of “common ground.”

During a seminar on this topic, Dr. Diletta de Bernart, a psychologist and psychotherapist, highlighted how a metaphor, to be clinically effective and generate therapeutic movement on the Third Planet, must possess three fundamental requirements: isomorphism, allusiveness, and polysemy. First of all, it must reflect the structure of the patient's experience, his specific map of the world and what he already knows. This is because, to build a common image, both the therapist and the patient must be aware of what they are talking about. Metaphor must also be able to touch “the preverbal and unconscious level without claiming to explain and make it explicit, eluding some defense mechanisms” (Onnis, 2017). Finally, it must be polysemic, that is, rich in nuance and open to multiple interpretations, leaving the patient complete freedom to explore and redefine their personal meanings.

Let us now see how a metaphor can be applied in the clinic.

A clinical example: Hans's tower, between success and loneliness

To grasp the clinical power of this approach we can turn to a metaphor I sometimes use with certain patients, drawn from Alice Miller's work The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self: the story of Hans.

“At first my dreams of the tower always showed my isolation and loneliness. [...] Hans had thus sought out his tower, had fought against obstacles [...] and when he had reached the top, that is to say had become more intelligent than the others, he felt alone and abandoned. [...] In the end he lived out his rebellion against the pressure to achieve and against stress, and the tower disappeared in the first dream he brought into therapy. He was able to give up the grandiose fantasy of seeing everything from above and managed to draw close to things in ‘his favorite city’ (in his Self).”

(The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self, Alice Miller, p. 109)

Hans is a child, later a man, who builds himself a beautiful, very tall and seemingly unassailable tower, overcoming every intellectual and emotional obstacle in order to be more intelligent than everyone else. But once he reaches the top and looks around, he finds himself completely alone.

The clinical turning point this image can offer lies in understanding that climbing the tower is not an act of proud autonomy or a spontaneous choice on Hans's part. Climbing the tower is, for him, the only possible strategy for adaptation and survival. Hans learns very early that the love and approval of others are strictly conditional on his performance, his adequacy, and his ability never to be a burden to those around him. The tower, then, represents the materialization of a highly performing “false self,” built to escape contempt and rejection, giving up one's most authentic needs in order to be accepted.

This metaphor proves especially effective with a specific type of person: those deeply structured around duty, goal achievement and performance, who struggle enormously to tolerate their own vulnerability and limitations. For them, error or imperfection can feel like a wound that threatens to call their entire identity and very sense of existence into question.

The image of the tower works with these people because it fully respects the three fundamental clinical qualities of metaphor. It is isomorphic, because it mirrors the exhausting experience of a continuous climb, step after step, where stopping is perceived as failure. It is allusive, because it allows the patient's deep inner loneliness to be explored indirectly, by speaking of Hans and his fortress rather than forcing the person to admit and recognize their own fragility. Finally, it is polysemic, as it opens space to explore different experiences tied to that construction: the patient may choose to dwell on the unspeakable effort of climbing, on the vertigo felt when looking down, or on the visceral fear that the tower might collapse if they were to step down even one rung.

Through this metaphor, the therapist does not merely interpret a behavior, but offers a safe symbolic place where the patient can finally explore their own suffering and fragility, feeling their experience understood, giving it a name and a meaning, and discovering that it is possible to come down from the tower without thereby ceasing to exist or to be loved.

Question for the Community

Thank you for joining me on this journey into the depths of symbolic language. In the hope that what you have read may spark reflection, criticism, or your imagination, I would love to hear about your experiences.

I leave you with two questions to share your thoughts.

What is the metaphor or clinical image that has proven to be a true “master key” for you, capable of giving voice to your own experience or that of a patient?

If you were to think of a therapy room you have inhabited (as a therapist or as a patient), is there an image, a comparison, or a shared metaphor that allowed you to meet on the “Third Planet”?

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Bibliography

Andolfi, M., & Angelo, C. (1989). Tempo e mito nella psicoterapia familiare.

Boscolo, L., Bertrando, P. (1996) Terapia sistemica individuale, Raffaello Cortina, Milano.

Cigoli V., Zatti A. (1992), La svolta e lo scontro. Per un'analisi della funzione comunicativa della metafora in consultazione familiare, Terapia Familiare, 40, pp. 23-37.

De Bernart, R. (2019). Immagine e implicito. PSICOBIETTIVO, (2019/1).

Lakoff, G. (2008). The neural theory of metaphor.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2022). Metafora e vita quotidiana. Roi edizioni.

Miller, A. (2010). Il dramma del bambino dotato e la ricerca del vero Sé: riscrittura e continuazione. Bollati Boringhieri.

Onnis L. (2017), Teatri di famiglia. La parola e la scena in terapia familiare, Bollati Boringhieri.