Therapeutic metaphors
Storytelling has been with us from long. It has been with us right from the days of campfire and besieging wild animals. Due to story telling, we have been able to perform the following functions: overcoming fears, communication of vital information. Apart from that, there is the satisfaction of a sense of order (justice), the development of the ability to hypothesize, predict and introduce theories and the list goes on.
Every one of us as human have a sense of wonder and we can experience the world with an urge to organize it. As we have been successful in imposing the structures of our mind on the outside world, we have not been much successful in knowing our own internal world and maybe we have forgotten the concept of inner universe which exists within us.
The relation between the structure and functioning of our mind, the structure and modes of operation of our physical brain and also the structure and conduct of the outside world has been the issue of debate for ages. We have the brain and the mind. Some people postulated the existence of a lattice of preconceived. These are born categorical knowledge about the universe. These are the vessels into which we pour our experience and we mould it. There are some other people who think of mind as a black box. It is quite difficult to understand the internal functioning and management of information of the brain. Pavlov coined the word "conditioning". Watson adopted it and invented "behaviorism" and later Skinner came up with "reinforcement". The school of epiphenomenologists considered the mind as the by product of the brain's "hardware" and "wiring" complexity, however all of them failed to address one key link which is how is mind linked to brain.
There was another camp which had a more scientific approach towards this. They speculated that the mind irrespective of whether it is a physical entity, an epiphenomenon or a non-physical principle of organization, it had something like a structure and a limited set of functions. These set of people argued that a "user's manual" could be compose with instructions. The most famous among them is "psychodynamists". Though Freud’s disciples diverged wildly from his initial theories, they all had a belief in the need to "scientific" and objectify psychology. Freud who was a medical doctor by profession came with a theory about the structure of the mind and its mechanic. There were flow charts were provided together and with this kind of analysis, a mathematical physics of the mind was formed.
The most essential part was missing which was testing of hypothesis though most of the theories were convincing and also had a great explanatory power. However they needed to be proved scientific enough.