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

Explores how language, stories, and metaphors shape illness experience and the process of healing and psychotherapy.

Laurence J. Kirmayer (Author)

9781009617789, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 July 2025

446 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm, 0.828 kg

'Laurence Kirmayer asks why his psychiatric perspective and biomedical ethics fail to connect meaningfully his patients' symptoms and their suffering. He outlines how the recent emphasis on narrative-based ethics imposes a distorting temporal and causal path on suffering and the self. At the core of this book is an enthralling presentation of seven dreams of a psychiatric intern that function as rationale for and defense of a poetics of illness in which, not ratiocination but myth and archetype autonomously lend meaning and evoke experiences of healing.' Craig E. Stephenson, author of Possession: Jung's Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche, Anteros: A Forgotten Myth, and Ages of Anxiety

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Clinical psychology [MMJ]