Metapher als Intervention

The main means trainers and consultants have is language. What they can reach very much depends on the choice of the “appropriate words”. So to find them – what to say and how to say it – plays a key role for the quality of interventions. In contrast to other possible conceptions we understand intervention as the establishment of a self-reflective distance of a system towards itself. So the main purpose of an intervention is to bring a system to a better understanding of itself and the situation the system is in. This concept of intervention is a precondition for the self-steering abilities of systems. The concept is culturally limited, for self-steering to some extent always means questioning the ruling principles and authorities. The article investigates the consciousness raising power of metaphors. It discusses the use of the rhetoric figure of the metaphor and connects this to general considerations concerning the anthropologic function of language. Giving things names contains pretty much emotionality, has a magical component and follows a mimetic principle. The allegedly rational terms themselves turn out to be metaphors, their semantic field is wider than one might expect which can be shown by the recourse to the etymology. The value of using metaphors for describing situations lies in their openness to collective emotions and in the widening of horizons. The article underlines the importance of a sense of language as part of the professional skills.