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"--

List of contents

Preface; Acknowledgments; 1. Into the Backcountry; 2. The Body's Insistence on Meaning; 3. Broken Narratives; 4. Animal Powers; 5. Healing Fictions; 6. Landscapes of Memory; 7. The Texture of Time; 8. Poetics of Alterity; 9. Asklepian Dreams; 10. Epilogue: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Poiesis; Notes; References; Index.

About the author

Laurence J. Kirmayer is Distinguished James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. He directs the Culture & Mental Health Research Unit at the Institute of Community and Family Psychiatry at Jewish General Hospital, Montreal. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Laurence J. Kirmayer, Laurence J. (Mcgill University Kirmayer
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 31.07.2025
• EAN: 9781009617796
• ISBN: 978-1-0-0961779-6
• No. of pages: 420
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Philosophy: general, reference works; PHILOSOPHY / Mind & Body, PSYCHOLOGY / Clinical Psychology, MEDICAL / Psychiatry / General, Philosophy of Mind, Psychiatry, Clinical psychology, Health psychology