The following study investigates a basic premise that the manner in which a doctor responds to a patient's emotions and thoughts affects the way a patient feels about telling more of his/her illness experience. This book investigates how a doctor and his patients conceptualize addiction, use language to express his/her conceptualization, and respond to each other in the context of their conversational illness narrative. Using George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), I analyzed the conceptual metaphors within these conversations. I found that patients' predominant structural metaphor is addiction is illness experience, and the doctor's predominant structural metaphor is addiction is disease. Additionally, my study conceptualized each conversation as a single narrative through which addiction is socially constructed by the doctor's and patient's rhetorical patterns of response to the other's structural metaphor. The doctor's and patients' responses within their...
