ABSTRACT
This chapter offers ‘proof’ to minds in thrall to the evidence-based regime, but a proof that can never be expressed as statistics and only as itself, according to a metaphorical process. Galen’s metaphoric intervention is to surprise with performative truth, putting the link between violence to others and spiritual violence to the self within spatial relation. Metaphor can become both spur and bond, both tool of identification and juxtaposition of difference. For the clinicians reading this, the following metaphor interventions can act, as they did in a paediatric pain study Bleakley comments upon, as “a heuristic, perhaps even as a comfort blanket.” The metaphor she used was actually part of a metaphor system in which caregivers could be likened to family, or the fact of her own family could be introduced as a means to identify with patients who were having problems with their family.
