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49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book changed my life, July 26, 2004
This is a quote from the book that I would consider its thesis statement:
'Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power are always an index of how much is not understood about a disease.
Moreover, there is a peculiarly modern predilection for psychological explanations of disease...Psychologizing seems to provide control...over which people have no control. Psychological understanding undermines the 'reality' of a disease.'
Sontag traces, historically, the ways different diseases and the people who contracted them have been viewed. She spends time discussing tuberculars--waif-like, pale, romantic--and cancer patients--repressed, the 'cancer personality,' shame--then goes on to debunk these notions by stating that once the cause, cure, innoculation is found, the 'myth' or popular psychology of the disease no longer holds.
In this edition, in the final chapter about AIDS and its metaphors Sontag writes that she'd written the first part of the book (all but the AIDS chapter) while a cancer patient and in response to reactions she saw in fellow patients. She saw guilt and shame; and she saw these as impediments to people's treatments. For she knew she had an illness and she set about to cure it medically, in the best possible way, while others passively accepted the 'metaphor' handed to them and, thus, did less to help themselves best. She felt frustrated or saddened by their psychologizing and self-blame and wished to write to others that their physical illness is a physical illness and the best route to recovery is to think only of how to find the best medical treatment.
And she wrote this by demonstrating the history of myths that surrounded illnesses and the way these myths evaporated as soon as its true mechanism (the virus, or otherwise) was found.
Some holes in her argument can be found in the field of Health Psychology, which has proved that optimism generates faster post-operative recovery or a heartier immune system, among other 'psychological' correlates of disease to illness. Still we speak of a "type A" personality and a possibility of a heart attack, etc., which I believe is not entirely unfounded -- stress creates a drop in immune response and other health deficiencies.
However, I am a patient and a former psychotherapist. I was reared in psychology as others are toward priesthood. I grew up sent to therapists for any ills and was raised with the thought I be nothing but a therapist when an adult -- which I did become. Then I became diabled, from physical injury. My own disability is largely pain-related; the pain is severe and in locations that make it impossible to function. Much of my injury does not show up on contemporary tests -- EMG's, CAT scans, MRI's, bone scans, sonograms.
So I turn to psychology. I know I've got a physical injury. But if it can not be cured (and I go back to my original quote: that which is least understood, we psychologize), perhaps I am, in part, a cause of it. This had been a comforting notion to me: if I can do this to myeslf, I can also undo it. For me, psychologizing helped put me in the driver's seat.
Sontag at first put me in the driver's seat in a new, determined, knowing way. I know my injury is not something that is "in my head." At first, Sontag's argument was a weight off my shoulders, an eye-opener. I underlined the passage above: yes, that's right; they don't know what's wrong with me so they blame me. A doctor once said to me: "When I can't find anything wrong with someone I assume there is nothing wrong with her."
Sontag set me in motion. She went into motion, knowing cancer wasn't a word to whisper (remember when we whispered that 'c' word?), but something to pursue with a vengeance. Her book was liberating. I know I don't want to be sick, unable to do the things I want to, regardless of how neatly one can analyze my personality and show otherwise. This is physical.
Then reality. I've got sometihng and it isn't curable and it is debilitating. I am in doctors' offices all the time; fighting beaurocracy all the time. I wanted my psychologizing back. My security blanket had been removed with this "epiphany" of sorts. If it's not in my head, and I can't cure myself, and doctos can't cure me, I'm incurable. Her philosophy, then, became saddening.
I began to analyze her: perhaps she recovered so well because of her strong personality, her [psychological] strength. It's a chicken/egg question.
Sontag writes things that are clear and other things that can be argued. Overall, her essays have changed societal thought -- from Against Interpretation to On Photography to Illness as Metaphor and various others; she is brilliant and a powerfully good writer. Anyone who can make us look at something in a new way, make us think something through in a new way, is easily well-worth reading.
Anyone who is ill, particularly chronically, undiagnosed or misunderstood should read this book. Agree with it or not, but read it. Read others that say the opposite, read about your own illness, but read this book: I would call it mandatory.
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44 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sontag's metaphors: A must read for any essay enthusiast, January 16, 1999
This review is from: Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (Paperback)
Even if we hadn't evolved the ability to think sensibly about the world around us, disease would have continued to be a major factor in Homo sapien debilitation and mortality. Conversely, if conscious beings had been born to a world free of disease, they would have still tried to find out how their universe functioned, and they probably would have employed the metaphor as an aid for conceptualizing notions not well understood. But for whatever reason, human beings did attain the ability to think critically about their surroundings, which happened to be a world filled with diseases. It should come as no surprise than that illness and disease, concepts sometimes etiologically and often morally incomprehensible, are often the subject for metaphors; an inevitable consequence of human insight intermingling with mysterious biological forces. In the view of the cultural critic Susan Sontag, however, metaphorizing illness and- perhaps more importantly- using illness as a metaphor can have damaging consequences for those afflicted. In her pair of related essays, Illness as a Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors, Susan Sontag reveals many of the metaphors surrounding such influential diseases as tuberculosis, cancer, syphilis, and AIDS. While she does acknowledge the necessity of the metaphor for human understanding, throughout her assays she argues that there "aren't some metaphors we might well abstain from or try to retire". Although this important point should by no means be taken lightly, the true worth in her essays is the skill in which she uncovers these metaphors and explains (she is, after all, against interpretation) the stigmatizing affects of the myths they create. Sontag does not limit the scope to which she describes the metaphors. On one level, illness moves from being metaphorized (e.g. "invasion" in the case of cancer and AIDS, "pollution" in case of syphilis and AIDS) to being used as a metaphor (e.g. "...a cancer on society"). At another level, disease metaphors can be viewed as either being directed at the individual (e.g. "the sensitive and creative character of the tubercular") or at the larger society (e.g. AIDS as punishment for sexual deviance). By examining illness metaphors from several viewpoints, Susan Sontag forces the reader to confront their own stereotypes of diseases and the people they infect. Indeed, her cultural theory powerfully compliments strictly historical or clinical analyses on human disease. While scientific or clinical approaches to disease focus exclusively on the individual, historical and epidemiological perspectives tend to overplay the importance of population dynamics. And none of these approaches alone can strip disease free of the stigmas that surround them. In Plagues and Peoples for instance, William H. McNeill's main premise is that human history has been largely influenced through time by the "introduction" of new diseases from "outsiders". However useful this view is to describing human history, it inherently reflects and perpetuates some common metaphors surrounding disease. It is for this reason that Susan Sontag targets him in her essay. For singling out groups of people, what are referred to as "risk-groups" today, in the discussion of plagues often implies punishment for evil, and this can be as dangerous as focusing on individual illness' as "transforming experiences". On the other hand, Sontag argues that scientific and medical descriptions can also contribute to disease metaphors. The clinical description of AIDS as occurring in stages and the view of cancers as geographical diseases of the body are metaphors widely applied today. The existence of other military-like immunological terms of describing disease such as "tumor escape", "killer T-cells", or "defensins", also could have added fuel to her argument. With these examples in mind, the question that must be asked is; can humans really approach disease without employing the use of metaphors? However impossible this may be, Illness as a metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors is successful in exposing the prejudices inherent in many of our past and present metaphors, and helps us distinguish the good ones from the bad.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
cancer phobia & AIDS as "payback" for sin, April 20, 2002
Cancer phobia, some people say, is worse than cancer. Well, not really... But true up to a point. Being afraid of a disease, be it cancer, AIDS, or whatever else, can be debilitating. And who of us doesn't know people that are scared to death of cancer, or of AIDS? And how can we all not be scared (maybe even terrified) of these diseases, when in our eyes they're not just diseases but are loaded with a whole lot of different meanings, mainly linked to death...
Susan Sontag's essay on cancer (& her later essay on AIDS) deal with these diseases as metaphors of whatever is bad, evil, reprehensible, sinful about human experience. Especially with cancer, the metaphor is more poignant, since, cancer still has unknown causes, at least up to a point: of course cancer now is much better understood, but in '78, when Sontag wrote the first essay, cancer was mostly unknown territory. Obviously, when we're talking about unknown territory, unknown (& mysterious) causes, there's a lot of theoretizing & projecting: anyone can project their own ideas on this white wall of ignorance. And so people 'fight' cancer, 'win the battle' against cancer, 'have cancer personalities', 'cause' their cancer or whatever else. It was even worse with AIDS, especially in the '80s: then it was widely (& stupidely) believed that this new disease was the payback for the free sexuality of the '70s, & especially of the sexuality of homosexuals.
Susan Sontag's essays tackle these issues & show the metaphors & prejudices of illness as what they are. They are important, clearly-written essays, & if today some of these ideas appear obvious or widely known, remember that Sontag talked about these things many years ago, being one of the first people to address the issue.
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