The Phenomenological Psychosomatic Theory
In this chapter, the phenomenological theory of psychosomatics is presented. The solution to the mind–body problematic is shown to be found in the concept of the lived body and the relationship between body—world as flesh. The psychosomatic condition is u
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The Phenomenological Psychosomatic Theory
To be in the world as a human being means to experience the world as a world. As shown in the previous chapters, the notion of ‘‘experience’’ is reformulated in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Human experience (being-towards-the-world/être au monde) is that reversibility between man and world where both ‘‘become’’ in a single movement that contains a unity of difference, in a process which is ever changing and evolving over time. We are the authors of the situations we ‘‘create’’ just as our lived situations, in a sense, create us, and cannot be understood apart from us. There is no subject without a situation in which s/he is inserted, and no situation without a human subject for whom it is a situation. This chiasm is the creation of the meaningful world for us. It is the way we live the world and the way the world appears to us. Furthermore, we are creatures of habit and sedimentation, who at the same time, continually transform and surpass the given. Using the Merleau-Pontian insights of the previous chapters, the next section of this book will show how psychosomatic pathology can be understood, first and foremost, as a breakdown in the ‘‘dialogue’’ between man and world, reducing experience to being-in-the-world as body. According to the theory outlined in this book,1 this level of meaning-constitution, the psychosomatic condition, is the result of a collapse in the natural harmony of adequate structure transformation. In psychosomatic illness, the person’s sedimented structures are not adequate for handling (making sense of, containing, solving) the challenges from the life world which precipitate the psychosomatic crisis, yet the patients cannot, for various reasons, transform their structures to accommodate the challenge. Instead, the response is a rudimentary body meaning (the psychosomatic symptom), a mute signaling, which is not adequate to the task at hand. Rather than bringing thoughts, feelings, willpower, values, decision making, resoluteness and activity to the fore (meaning-constitution at the level of self), the person responds to the challenge at the lower end of the mind/body continuum with a body meaning. Whenever the 1
I should make clear that Merleau-Ponty himself never wrote about psychosomatics. It is my own application of his concepts and insights to the phenomenon of psychosomatics which constitutes the phenomenological psychological theory presented in the following chapters.
J. Bullington, The Expression of the Psychosomatic Body from a Phenomenological Perspective, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-6498-9_5, The Author(s) 2013
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body steps in and ‘‘expresses’’ where higher order level meaning-constitution would be more appropriate, I call this condition ‘‘psychosomatic.’’ This entails an altered experience of body, self and world. In the course of this chapter we will see how this is comprehensible in the light of the lived body and the flesh. We recall that ‘‘the lived bo
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