Therapeutic Metaphor Use: Lessons from Eating Disorder Autopathography

Recorded January 24, 2024. An interactive seminar by Jakob Summerer
(TCD) Therapeutic Metaphor Use: Lessons from Eating Disorder
Autopathography as part of the Medical and Health Humanities
Seminar Series. Ever since Susan Sontag’s pioneering
studies Illness as Metaphor (1978) and Aids and its
Metaphors (1989), research into the potential effects of
metaphor use in health-related talk and thought has been a staple
of the Medical/Health Humanities. Following in Sontag’s footsteps,
scholars have focussed both on the ethical implications and
stigmatising effects of metaphor use, as well as the scripto- and
biblio-therapeutic potential of metaphorising illness experience.
What is, unfortunately, all too often missing in discussions of
metaphor in the Medical/Health Humanities (and, in fact, in
Sontag’s own work) is any theoretical, methodological or empirical
grounding in those fields that have come to specialise in metaphor
analysis and metaphor-based treatment interventions respectively:
Linguistic Metaphor Theory and Metaphor Therapy. Informed by these
approaches and building on a stylistic analysis of contemporary
memoirs written by people with eating disorders, I will explore in
this paper what a post-Sontagian approach to illness metaphor might
look like. I will further outline some of the insights such an
approach may yield into the uses and abuses of metaphor in recovery
from mental illness. Jakob Summerer is currently doing his PhD
research on metaphor and metonymy use in German-language eating
disorder memoirs at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He teaches
classes on German film, language, and literature at Maynooth
University and TCD. At TCD, he acts as representative for the PGRs
in the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies. He
further acts as the PG representative within the German Studies
Association of Ireland. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/