Poeticizing medical moods during pandemics: a cognitive psychoanalysis of COVID-19 metaphors in doctors’ poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper is a cognitive psychoanalysis of COVID-19 metaphors in four poems composed by doctors during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to demonstrate the efficacy of Metaphor as a vehicle for expressing different medical temperaments and modeling doctors’ psychological responses to the pandemic. Using Conceptual Metaphor theory as the theoretical framework, the study investigates the metaphorical expressions doctors use by framing them in terms of concrete concepts to make the abstract moods behind them more easily comprehensible. The study finds that doctors use medical imagination to generate metaphorical devices related to Hospital, Heart, Military, and Climate to express feelings of stress depression, self-affirmation, and elation. The study attempts to respond to the enormous need of the literary-stylistic investigation of Medicinal poetry as a representation of constructive collaboration between medicine and literature and offering reflections of the accounts of human psychology in times of global health crises.