Creativity and Body: Living Metaphors in the Context of People Undergoing Heart Transplantation

Abstract

This article explores the embodied dimension of authoring life trajectories for individuals who have undergone heart transplantation. Confronting the radical otherness of existential finitude can create a rich context for examining the relationships between authorship, corporeality, and creative processes. By integrating Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body with Susanne Langer's theory of affective semiosis and presentational signs, this work aims to foster a productive dialogue between these perspectives, grounded in Semiotic Cultural Psychology, which meta-theoretically synthesizes a diverse range of knowledge on the transformative interaction between individuals and culture. The article presents three participants' cases, selected for their ideographic expressiveness, as empirical evidence that both enlivens and enriches this study's theoretical and epistemological foundations. The fragments of participants' elaborations were derived from individual interviews conducted at the IMIP heart transplant clinic between 2022 and 2023. IMIP is a university hospital located in Recife. The interviewees were adults who had undergone transplantation at least one year prior. The discussion of the reports highlights three interpretative axes: (a) embodied ambiguities and tensions experienced; (b) living metaphors and potential presentational signs regarding life trajectories; (c) ways of referencing the future and temporality of experiences felt intensely in the present and their methods of reconstructing the past. The interpretative analysis of participants' metaphors aims to shed light on the role of corporeality in the construction of meaning and, consequently, in the creative perspective of life and the sense of authorship when facing the alterity, in this case, specifically of illness and consecutive heart transplantation. This article seeks to contribute to studying affective semiosis and corporeality in Cultural Psychology by highlighting its hermeneutic relevance as a critical feature of the human cultural construction of the self, others, and the world.

Keywords: Body; Creativity; Heart transplantation; Presentational signs.