Abstract
The relationship between mind, body, and affect is a prominent strand in the medical humanities, and this article explores connections between the thinking subject and affected body in the medieval period, drawing on related areas of metaphor, imagination, and creativity. The medieval condition, or state, of heaviness establishes a link between body and mind and emphasises the importance of expression both for personal health and for effective communication with others. Metaphors combine actual symptoms with creative expressions to give a physical form to extreme sadness, which foregrounds the complex mental, and sometimes imaginatively corporeal, manifestations of disabling inner anguish.
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Notes
Elsewhere Janov lists the complaints from his patients, among them: ‘immobilized and paralyzed,’ ‘something wants out,’ ‘falling into a black hole,’ and ‘an overall heaviness or deadness’ (Janov, 2013, 82).
Such external signs include a loss of interest or pleasure in all or almost all normal activities or pastimes, poor appetite, insomnia, psychomotor agitation or retardation, slowed thinking or indecisiveness, and fatigue (American Psychiatric Association, 1981, 296).
See also Horowitz (2001).
The term also exists in Old English, meaning the oppressed condition of the body. See Jackson (1986, 397).
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McKinstry, J. Heaviness: illness, metaphor, opportunity. Postmedieval 8, 170–178 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0049-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0049-z