Being in the same boat, in two ways

In research on conflicts, the systematic study of metaphors is playing an increasingly prominent role. In the context of a U.S. – Swiss–Hungarian international collaboration investigating conflicts through interviews with healthcare professionals, the present chapter analyzes linguistic and conceptual metaphors in Hungarian interviews. The theoretical background for the analysis is provided by the cognitive theory of metaphor, while its methodology is based on MIPVU.Moving away from linguistic representations, this study aims to analyze the role of metaphors in the conceptualization, interpretation, and management of conflicts. The chapter presents general, conventionalized orientational and ontological metaphors of conflict, also exploring the core metaphors of the metaphor families of competition and cooperation as well as correlations between conflicts and power structures.