Abstract

Human beings rely on metaphor as a primary cognitive device for interpreting the world around them. Metaphors figure especially strongly in discourse around health, illness, and medicine. It is not just that patients use metaphors to describe their personal experience of being unwell, or that medical professionals employ metaphor to convey a diagnosis, describe a treatment, or explain the function of an organ to their patients. Metaphor, it is argued, lies at the heart of the process of diagnosis. Moreover, diagnosticians employ competing metaphors in the early stages of diagnosis to speculate on alternative ways of viewing a puzzling set of symptoms. Diagnosis is often defined as a process of ordering and classifying, while metaphor is a device for playing with classifications. The medical systems of different cultures depend on different sets of fundamental metaphors. Modern Western biomedicine is organized around a series of basic metaphors: the body as machine, the body as the site of battle, and the body as a communication system. Traditional Chinese medicine, on the other hand, uses images of flow and blockage, balance and imbalance, and works by analogy with five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Psychologists are sometimes able to detect from a patient’s own use of metaphor, or inability to use or recognize metaphor, clues to a diagnosis of psychosis or autism. With conditions such as anorexia nervosa, therapists may actually work to modify the dysfunctional metaphors by which patients depict themselves, with the purpose of establishing positive metaphors for envisaging recovery.