Metaphors of Suffering
Burnout. What a metaphor! The vital sense of being used up, depleted, all combustable fuel exhausted seems readily packed into this small compound word. Amazing to think it has only been part of the vernacular since the 1970s.
Jill Lepore’s brilliant exploration of the term’s history and her meditation on the suffering it indexes is the subject of a recent piece in The New Yorker. She finds that “burn-out” emerged to describe the condition of heroin addicts and Viet Nam veterans in San Francisco who peopled the free clinics of Haight Ashbury.
This got me thinking about the term and concept of depression, which burnout orbits both conceptually and clinically. It appears that our current psychological use of the word Depression as a noun dates to 1905, in the work of German psychologist Emil Kraepelin.
What these and other terms give us access to and serve to remind us of is the extent to which psychological suffering is experienced as physical pain. It is of course this physical pain, its persistence and the sense of its inescapability that often lead to addiction, as people search for escape or release from their suffering.
The question of Lepore’s essay is whether burnout is a modern (recently emerged) condition or a human (universal, timeless) one. Her allusions to the traumas of war, battle fatigue, shell shock and the more recent and clinical post-traumatic stress disorder all suggest that this is not really an either/or question. Humans suffer because our conscious experiences are ingested and metabolized in the body where they can metastasize and live as toxins which continue infect our bodies beyond the original trauma.
Our suffering is also specific. The traumas of enslavement and systemic racism are very different from those of clinicians who become exhausted and depleted by the“neverending” work on the frontline of a pandemic. This specificity is critical to our understanding of each other and to the very different and real experiences that distinguish different realities of suffering. The language and metaphor through which we express suffering is a rich vein in our effort to excavate the meaning that people make out of their pain.
I had been wondering about why the term gaslighting has seemed to have recently become so prevalent in the description of injury and trauma of Black folks in the United States. This, too, is a term of relatively recent coinage and which emerges from the clinical discourse of psychology, though it was borrowed by psychologists from George Cukor’s 1944 film, Gaslight. There is no doubt an interesting and important story about how this was adopted as a term of art used to index a distinct kind of Black suffering in present day America. But the use of a term that describes the deliberate manipulation of a person to make them think that they are insane is precisely the horror at the center of Jodan Peele’s Get Out.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously shifted his perspective about meaning in language away from a logical view and toward an anthropological one when he suggested that we search for meaning in the way we see people using the language.
Our metaphors for suffering are signs, signals to each other about the locus of our pain, voices expressing the specific kinds of injury done. The suffering is real, the metaphors are clues to the nature of the damage done.
