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Multiple dimensions of embodiment in medical practices

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Abstract

In this paper I explore the various meanings of embodiment from a patient’s perspective. Resorting to phenomenology of health and medicine, I take the idea of ‘lived experience’ as starting point. On the basis of an analysis of phenomenology’s call for bracketing the natural attitude and its reduction to the transcendental, I will explain, however, that in medical phenomenological literature ‘lived experience’ is commonly one-sidedly interpreted. In my paper, I clarify in what way the idea of ‘lived experience’ should be revisited and, subsequently, what this reconsideration means for phenomenological research on embodiment in health and medicine. The insight that the body is a condition of possibility for world-disclosing yet, at the same time, itself conditioned by this world forces us to not only zoom in on the body’s subject-side, but also on its object-side. I argue that in order to render account for this double body ontology, phenomenology should include empirical sociological analyses as well. I thus argue in favor of the idea of a socio-phenomenology. Drawing on material from my own research project on embodied self-experiences after breast surgery, I show how this approach can be fruitful in interpreting the impact of disfigurements on a person’s embodied agency, or a person’s ‘I can’.

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Notes

  1. The external view on the body is often identified with a third person’s perspective on one’s body (which in the field of health and medicine has become a synonym for a physician’s instrumental and objectifying view). However, an external view on one’s body could also imply a second person’s perspective on one’s body, which, indeed, implies a far less instrumental attitude. This further classification of the notion of external view goes beyond the scope of this paper. I tackle this subject in another paper.

  2. Although the phenomenological approach is mostly used to provide insight in physical orders, it should be noted that the phenomenological conception of ‘embodied being in the world’ is also gaining ascendency in the interpretation of mental disorders. See for this notably the work of Fuchs (2005, 2007), De Haan and Fuchs (2010), and Ratcliffe (2008, 2009).

  3. As I see it, experiences of pain or of discomfort not necessarily result in experiences of self-alienation. In some situations pain can also lead to experiences of self-confirmation. Cole (2004), for instance, describes how people suffering from tetraplegia due to spinal cord injury, and who most of the time cannot feel their own body anymore, can be ‘anchored’ in their body through pain. Pain “is almost my friend” one of his interviewees said, because “it puts me in touch with my body” (p. 89). Conversely, I would not reserve the experience of alienation to negative or pathological experiences such as pain and discomfort only. From a phenomenological point of view, one could also argue that any experience of one’s own body from an external perspective involves self-objectification and thus alienation. In that sense I agree with Ingerslev (2013) who discusses external explicit body experience in terms of ‘self-distance’, and shows that this phenomenon accounts for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences.

  4. I would like to thank Nicholas Smith for drawing my attention to this text by Ahmed.

  5. In this project I have ‘followed’ 19 women who have undergone breast surgery for a period of 8–10 months by means of multiple interviews. The main question in this research is how women habituate to disfigurements and (if applicable) to the usage of a concealing prosthesis.

  6. In that sense my approach to embodiment is close to the way Mol (2002) analyzes the multiplicity of body ontologies while concentrating on the question how a ‘disease is done’, how a ‘body is done’ in various practices. However, there remains a considerable difference between her ethnographical approach to embodiment and my socio-phenomenological one. Whereas she holds the view that a ‘practice’ is something local, and not generalizable, I believe that a phenomenological exploration of embodiment can identify generalizable forms of embodied self-experiences. This difference amounts to the fact that my philosophy of the body still adheres to the request of bracketing the natural attitude, the call for the reduction, even though a complete reduction or bracketing is never possible.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Annemie Halsema and Marjolein de Boer for their instructive and challenging suggestions on a previous version of this paper. Also thanks to an anonymous reviewer for providing effective comments. This research is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research—NWO (VIDI-Grant 276-20-016).

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  1. Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Maastricht University, PO Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Jenny Slatman

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Slatman, J. Multiple dimensions of embodiment in medical practices. Med Health Care and Philos 17, 549–557 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-014-9544-2

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