ABSTRACT
Somatic metaphors raise many questions as to the nature of personhood, and whether, within the Western cultural and scientific traditions, this chapter have got an adequate framework for understanding persons and their diseases. The chapter actually discovers somatic metaphors through the correlations of the manifestations of physical diseases with patients' meanings conveyed through speech and language. An exploration of language-making in relation to meaning-full disease is crucial to an examination of the nature of personhood. Beginning with the phenomenon of resistance to becoming aware of this, the chapter explores the tendency one have to separate and reduce things, and indeed, to believe the mind/body whole is fundamentally made up of separate parts and entities. One have also seen that such separating is in the nature of language-making, but that some forms of language increase and others decrease this tendency, which suggests we need to be careful as to how we speak of mind/body realities.
