Bodies

My wife’s recent stay in hospital got me thinking about our bodies, power relations and how psychology in general has failed to consider our bodies as something more than either, a bunch of interconnected neurons in the Central nervous System, or simply as a vehicle to move our mind about from one place to another. Neither of these two descriptions gives a very accurate description of how it feels to me to have a body. The body has generally been the realms of the biological medical world where the body is an object to be studied, measured, compared, poked, prodded and analysed. Any relation between this object body and stuff going on in my mind has been purely coincidental.

The problem started with René Descartes, a seventeenth century philosopher, who saw subjective human experience as being qualitatively different from the objective world of the physical universe, in which he included our bodies. This is what became known as the Cartesian Dualism. That is a separation of the mind and body, and has been debated backwards and forwards ever since.

Bodies are great things, mine works pretty damn well considering all the stick that it’s received over the years, in fact if it was a sensibly priced European car it would have probably given up the ghost a long time ago. But my body is changing, I don’t mean in a sort of getting older type way, which obviously it is, but I’m becoming much more aware of it lately. Its limits, its shape, how it reacts to certain situations, all seem strange lately. When I was seventeen for example, I don’t remember having a body. I took it so much for granted it always comfortably responded when I wanted it too and it didn’t really give any problems.

This type of body is what is known to the existential philosophers such as Maurice Merleau- Ponty as the subject body. That is the subjective feeling of having a body that interacts with the world. “The body is the vehicle of being in the world” says Merleau- Ponty, “Our body connects us to the world.. offers us a way to understand the world”.

I hate the word “holistic” and its connotations with new age crackpots, pop psychology self help books and aromatherapy. But if we are to take Merleau- Ponty seriously we cant get much more holistic than that. Our body, our mind and the world interconnected. This is I fear where modern medicine fails to deliver, it is still bent of separating our mind and body, the individual from the social and maintaining our body as an object.

Our body is linked to our feelings about our self, we are our bodies and illness is not just a body thing, it also affects everything about us. When things are going well and we take for granted our subject body we don’t notice it. But it only takes illness and our body suddenly becomes an object, uncomfortable, painful and awkward. 

I recently read a great piece of research carried out by Linda Finlay (2003) where she interviewed a young mother who had been diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis. The patient described how she lost the feeling in her fingertips and had a sensation of numbness. Now not such a big deal you might say, and medically you’d be right. But if we take into account the terrible sensations she had as she tried to cuddle her children and the fact that if she rubbed her hand down her childs cheek, she could not feel it. This affected her at all levels as she wrestled with the idea that she wouldn’t be able to feel her children again.

This goes much further than illness being something related to our bodies, we can see that illness affects the way people feel about themselves and how they understand both themselves and the world around them. Present day medicine is still determined to maintain the mind separate from the body and to only treat the object body, which is a great pity.