Illness and Spirituality: Private to Public Metaphors and Transfigurations

This paper proposes that healing — whether practiced by shamans, allopathic physicians, curanderos, priests, or therapists—achieves its greatest efficacy when illness is transformed, through metaphor and language into a manageable object placed in relation to an existing world of meaning, shared with others, and part of the culture, such as spirituality and religion. That is, a private to public transfiguration, as Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) and the author (hidden, 2026) have elaborated. Drawing from anthropologist Michael Jackson’s The Palm at the End of the Mind (2009) and Between One and One Another (2012), my paper argues that language functions not merely as communication but as world-constitution: private fears and questions are turned into direct objects of language, i.e. into culturally shared concepts that allow the person and society to confront disease and exert a measure of control over illness and suffering.