Healing and the Invention of Metaphor : Toward a Poetics of Illness Experience

This book presents an integrative approach to the place of language, metaphor, imagination, and symbolic action in illness experience and diverse forms of healing and psychotherapy. It will interest anyone who seeks to better understand how language shapes symptoms and suffering, and how metaphors can help or hinder healing transformations.

It has long been understood that illness is influenced not only by our bodies'' physiology, but also language, culture, and meaning. This book, written by renowned cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, explores of the influence of metaphor, narrative, and imagination in experiences of suffering and processes of healing across cultures. It emphasizes how metaphor can open a window to the hidden mechanisms of healing driven by meaning and symbolism, myth and imagination. At the same time, it offers a rigorous critical account of the metaphors embedded in the epistemology and practice of contemporary biomedicine, psychiatry, and psychotherapy. In doing so, it exposes the sociomoral and political dimensions of these dominant approaches to understanding and treating illness.