LIBRI DI STEFANO TOMELLERI

Le metafore in opera nelle pratiche mediche - This article presents the results of an interdisciplinary research based on the study of metaphors at work during the medical visits of 5 oncologists - 3 males, (respectively 41, 43, and 60 year old), 2 females (respectively 41 and 58 year old) - for a total of 61 clinical talks that have been videotaped at an hospital in Northern Italy. The choice to study metaphors at work in medical practice greatly depends on our research experience and the realization that both doctors and patients had recourse to them during clinic talks and the use of such metaphors played a complex role that could not merely be referred to the exemplification of clinic concepts and words. From the analysis of recorded conversations we have discovered that the use of metaphors favoured: a) the contextualization of clinic conversations within wider macro-social structures; b) the definition of behaviours, roles, and decisional processes linked to social representations; c) the creative solution for the often irreconcilable tension between the subjective and bodily aspects of what we can call illness, the objective and impersonal character of its clinic definition (disease), and its social dimension (sickness).

Key-words: medicalization, metaphor, disease, illness, sickness, oncology.

Parole chiave: medicalizzazione, metafora, disease, illness, sickness, oncologia.

Intensive Care Units are among the Health Care Organizations mainly crossed in the last decade from radical transformations. Such processes of deep innovation, contribute to redefine professional practice of doctors and nurses. In our research, based on 5 focus group carried out in 2005, in 5 ICU in North Italy, we have analyzed the communicative narratives that doctors and nurses put in existence in their daily practice. Two narratives, linked to two thematic topics, emerged from the data: emotionality versus involvement and separation; decisional ambivalence versus coherence and coordination.

In this paper I look for a connection between Vattimo’s notion of deconstruction and the emotion of ressentiment in Girard’s mimetic theory. Girard puts the close relationship between violence and the sacred at the heart of the social order: the "scapegoat" caused by human rivalry. Girard maintains that Jesus is the source of the modern process of decostruction, because he unmasked the founding mechanism of violence and spoke of sacrifices in order to reject them. Vattimo holds that Nietzsche’s nihilistic deconstruction is the realization of christianity and the opportunity for a peaceful reconciliation. But Girard understands nihilism as the process that brings competition and ressentiment in again. dotfil01@nemo.cce.unipr.it

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