Reframing Breast Cancer Experience through Metaphors: A New Operative System to Enhance Patients’ Healing Process

Adapting healthcare to patients’ metaphor use is key in understanding the association between language and patient’s emotional and cognitive processes, thus influencing their healing trajectories (Hommerberg, Gustafsson & Sandgren, 2020). Inspired by Sontag’s work (1978), several studies criticized the use of bellicose metaphors for cancer, as they provide stereotypical narratives that negatively frame illness experience, with the risk of engendering fatalism or self-blame in patients who are likely to ‘lose’ their ‘battle’ (Semino et al., 2018). Comparing cancer to an ‘enemy to be fought’ may even compromise adherence, unfolding the need for cross-disciplinary research aimed at bridging the gap between cognition and discourse by empowering health communication (Putignano et al., 2020; Semino et al., 2018). To meet this need, this work aims to describe a systematic protocol to be implemented in the near future within the Breast Care Unit of the Bari University Hospital. Driven by patients’ demand for personalized communication while coping with breast cancer (Putignano et al., 2020), this protocol aims to embrace an individualized perspective on patients’ manifold illness experiences. Hence, protocol procedures involve the administration of psychological screening inventories, together with visual-verbal cards retrieved from Semino’s Metaphor Menu (2019), in an effort to: 1.build a novel corpus of patients’ metaphors; 2.establish a patient-centered protocol made up of a brief interview regarding metaphors, in addition to psychometric questionnaires; 3.detect potential relationships between self-reported illness representation, emotional status, and psychological- discursive strategies.