Illness as Metaphor

Illness as Metaphor, Eng. Illness as Metaphor, is the title of an essay published in 1978, the American journalist and writer Susan Sontag. She died in 2004 at the age of 71 years even cancer.

In the 1970s, the idea has been discussed intensively in the American public that the disease of cancer can be understood as an image of something else, and thus as a metaphor. In the case of cancer, the disease should reflect an inability of the patient to express feelings and act out, and ultimately its "inability " even causing the disease to be. In this view, cancer would ultimately be self-inflicted.

After Sontag today AIDS is taken the place of cancer. In its follow-on AIDS and Its Metaphors ( Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY, the first edition on January 1, 1989) she intensively to ensure that disease is not understood as a metaphor.