Cultural poetics of illness and healing

An approach to illness experience and healing emphasizes embodied metaphor and social processes of self-construal through material and discursive engagement with cultural affordances. The work outlines implications for theory, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry, drawing on cognitive science, enactivist perspectives, and the cultural poetics of symptom and healing ritual.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on “Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing.” The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry.