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Medical and moral constructions of psychosomatic conditions: reflections on three papers
Catherine Garrett
School of Applied Social and Human Sciences, University of Western Sydney, Parramatta Campus, Australia
Abstract
I've been asked to talk about the differences between my approach, Fran's and Gillian's. This is very difficult because when a text engages me, I see connections and extensions rather than differences from my own thinking. As I read their papers, I got quite excited at the prospect of sharing them with my students in health studies and nursing to show how sociologists bounce off each other's thinking. I can't help seeing knowledge as a process of inclusion rather than exclusion, so that's the perspective from which I'm going to speak. I want to say a few things about the ways our papers complement each other, leaving you to find the differences.
My own paper is an example of how editors and reviewers can deftly shift the author's intention, if only by suggesting a new title. It was originally about `sex' and `the divine' and their connection, as seen through the experience of recovery from a `so-called eating disorder', and it showed how people use metaphor to make associations between apparently different aspects of their experience - especially between body and self, self and other, self and the world. Its conclusion was, and still is, that recovery from anorexia is a poetic creation by the person concerned and occurs outside medical-psychiatric description and measurement, but it also suggested that if clinicians took a more poetic approach to the problem they could reach new understandings of a practical nature concerning aetiology, recovery and prevention. Now that it bears the title (carefully negotiated) `Remaking the self through metaphor', the emphasis has moved to its method - and this is what connects it with the other two papers.
It is not called `reconstructing the self' because it does not take a social constructionist position as such. It is much closer to Fran's call for sociology to explore the links between biology and society: to explain how culture might construct the body. Like Gillian, I'm saying that it does so through metaphor. I've used 30 interviews with people who have recovered or are recovering from anorexia and/or bulimia, and examined what they said about sex and spirituality in particular. I've compared their use of language with hat of people who are still anorexic to show the emergence, during recovery, of a new set of metaphors. I've found remarkable parallels with the metaphors of Merleau-Ponty writing about sexuality (in The Phenomenology of Perception) and Irigaray about divinity (in Divine Women). I've argued that these metaphors themselves were implicated in transforming people from their anorexic or bulimic state to the new bodily self they now experience. The transition took place through their creation of a new `imaginary body' which they live as if it were their `real' body - which it eventually becomes. Another way of saying this might be to argue that the imaginary body is inseparable from the lived body anyway…..
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