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.