The Body – Another

3 - The Body – Another

Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Perspectives

from Part I - Body and Time: General Aspects

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 October 2020

Dorothée Legrand

Edited by

Christian Tewes and

Giovanni Stanghellini

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Christian Tewes: Affiliation:
Heidelberg University Hospital
Giovanni Stanghellini: Affiliation:
Chieti University

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Summary

In this contribution, I consider what we call “body” and its role in clinical practices. My chapter draws upon the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan. This allows me to consider not only the body as a materiality structured by its finitude, not only the body as a locus of our lived experiences, not only the body as anchoring our actions, but also the body as it incarnates otherness. Otherness is here understood as twofold: On the one hand, the body as a living organism is a generality and its functioning hosts a germ of depersonalization; on the other hand, and at the same time, the body is that which keeps any other subject away from me, separated from me, irreducible to me. It thus appears that the body is both at once a concretion of alterity and of singularity. On the basis of such a conceptualization of the body, I consider the possibility of designing a clinical practice informed by both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan.

Keywords

Body-for-Others Body-Object Lived Body Living Body Psychopathology Sheer Flesh

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: Time and Body
Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches
, pp. 43 - 54
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108776660 [Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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