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‘Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship’. With these provocative words, Susan Sontag begins her short work, Illness as metaphor (originally published in the New York Review of Books as three essays). If illness is part of the dark, unconscious side oflife, then by understanding the metaphors surrounding an illness, such as cancer, we might get a glimpse of archetypal forces at work. For, as Jung said, archetypes express themselves first and foremost in metaphor. Dr Lockhart, in ‘Cancer in myth and dream’ ( Spring 1977), discusses the imagery and metaphors associated with cancer, especially the notion of the cancer ‘victim’. The disease of cancer itself seems to be the ‘victim’ of collective projections of such proportions that it can be considered a modern myth.
Illness as metaphor offers insight into the metaphorical use of disease, and also the imagery or myths that surround illnesses, especially tuberculosis and cancer. However, it provides only the primary material, in the way that a collection of UFO myths would have provided the groundwork for Jung's essay on that subject. Sontag has no psychological orientation or purpose; and the book often moves too quickly and lacks development of her best insights.
Her explicit purpose is to elucidate the myths about cancer so that the subject can be ‘de-mythicised’, for she feels that the popular notions about cancer burden the individual sufferer and possibly hinder proper treatment. The book might better be entitled Illness not as metaphor. Of course, no subject can be de-mythicised, because myths arise from the unconscious, for reasons that invite deeper understanding. So how are we to understand this request? It seems to me that Sontag is essentially asking for a separation between the collective projections and individual experience, a task which is central to analytic work.
There are two roads Sontag could take: describing the individual experience, and how and where it differs from collective no