Game 1
It’s a shame that our most powerful healing force has been characterized by a war metaphor, like there’s a battle going on inside your body, with bad guys and good guys, foreign invaders, and defenses. (p. 3)
Much of the idiom of our language is deeply embedded in certain metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). Metaphor helps us understand new things by expressing it in terms of something else. Think about how you talk when you have a cold or an illness.
“I’m going to beat this thing.”
“His diabetes finally caught up with him.”
“The arthritis is attacking my joints.”
The underlying metaphor is that ILLNESS IS WAR. One side is going to win and the other is going to lose. This metaphor conveys that there are battles being waged inside your body—for example, either germs or a virus is the attacker, and your white blood cells are the defenders. The cells are just doing their job, like your liver and kidney cells just do their job every time you eat something.
Not only are battles being waged internally, but they are also going on in the skies. The weather terminology of warm fronts and cold fronts was invented after World War I, and the model was two opposing armies (fronts).
We don’t learn these metaphors consciously; they are communicated subtly and we pick them up (there’s another metaphor, by the way, IDEAS ARE THINGS) by listening to other people speak. If we become more conscious of the metaphors we use, we might be able to shift our understanding of and relation to things such as illness.
By characterizing illness using the war metaphor, it puts you in an oppositional position to something. It artificially separates you from the illness even though the illness is in you! Did you know that most of the bacteria that cause infections already live on your body?
What other things are characterized by the war metaphor? (e.g., the generation gap, arguments, games?) Write some down.
If, indeed, our bodies are simply doing their job and responding to circumstances, what might that tell us about conditions such as arthritis or fibromyalgia? What might be a more appropriate metaphor for illness and the body’s response to it? Speculate on what other metaphors might work for the examples you gave. How would we think and speak differently if we had a different metaphor for illness/health? (For example, we could use the metaphor ILLNESS IS A BOOK. We might then say things like “This cold is just a short story.” “I’ve got an epic novel of a fever.” “Your symptoms are pure fiction.” Or we could use the metaphor ILLNESS IS INFORMATION. What might we say then?)
Conversely, the notion of war as presented in The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, could be used. War is characterized as the tao, the way, which is natural. After all, conflict is natural. Warm, moist air does collide with cold dry air to produce rain or snow.
Notice how technology influences our metaphors for the way things work. In the 1950s, the new technology was television, so we had TV dinners. Now the technology is computers, so we have Laptop dinners. Scientists thought of the brain in terms of a computer (or maybe it was the other way around). Psychologists believed that certain propensities were “hard wired” and that our “early programming” affects our view of life. Has anyone compared your memory to an iPod yet?