Language, literal or metaphorical, simply fails when it comes to pain, contrary to our common belief that it can capture a wide range of human experiences. Linguistic options available to depict the sensation are simply far and few in between, and most of the time, to no avail. Great writers such as Virginia Woolf find it hard to portray, even just the bodily pain. As observed in her essay “On Being Ill,” Woolf wrote, “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Linguists such as Elina Semino also discover the difficulty in describing pain: “Sensations conveyed by the English word pain tend to be described via expressions that refer to potential causes of bodily damage.”

Admitting that the language of pain is very complicated, we intend to explore, in this course the use of metaphors in trauma narratives as an attempt to describe this very common human experience. The course will be conducted more or less as a workshop format so that students can learn a lot more about therapeutic effect of communication (via reading, listening and writing). Such an approach is made possible thanks to the recent interdisciplinary discourse between psychoanalysis, trauma theory and narratives.