Post on 17-Dec-2015
ED(s), Embodiment, and Identity
Introduction
Outlook
Disorder of eating behaviour
Disorder of embodiment
Disorder of identity
Hypothesis
Persons with EDs experience their own body first and foremost as an object being looked at by another, rather than coenesthetically or from a first-person perspective.
Clinical impressions (supporting the hypothesis)
Alienation from one’s own body and from one’s own emotions,
disgust for it, shame, and an exaggerated concern to take
responsibility for the way one appears to the others;
as well as the capacity to feel oneself only through the look of the others,
through objective measures and through self-starvation
Phenomenological framework
Many of the features of persons with EDs can be illuminated by looking at it in the light of the Sartrean concept of feeling a lived-body-for-others.
Three bodies
Living/Lived body (Leib)Object body (Körper)Lived body for others
Living/lived body (Leib)
The body experienced from within, my own direct experience of my body in the first-person perspective, myself as a spatiotemporal embodied agent in the world.
This is the coenesthetic apprehension of one’s own body, the primitive experience of oneself, the basic form of self-awareness, or direct, unmediated experience of one’s own body.
Chaire (Merleau-Ponty)
LEIB (in statu detrahendi)
LIVING BODY, rather than
Dead body Devitalized body Deanimated body An-emotional body An-intentional body Mechanical body
LIVED BODY, rather than
Perceived body Objectualized body Externalized body Explicit Body Pornographic body
Object-body (Körper)
The body explicitly perceived and/or thematically investigated from without, as for example by natural sciences as anatomy and physiology, from a third person perspective.
The body that can be manipulated.
Lived Object
The lived-body turns into a physical, objective body whenever we become aware of it in a disturbing way.
Implicit=> Explicit
Whenever our movement is somehow impeded or disrupted, then the lived-body is thrown back on itself, materialized or ’corporealized’.
It becomes an object for me.
Lived body for others One can apprehend one’s own body as something when it is
looked at by another person. When I become aware that I - or better that my own body - is
looked at by another person, I realize that my body can be an object for that person.
Sartre: the ‘lived-body-for-others’.
“With the appearance of the Other’s look I experience the revelation of my being-as-object”.
The upshot of this is a feeling of
“having my being outside (…) [is the feeling] of being an object”.
Thus, one’s identity becomes reified by the gaze of the other, and reduced to the external appearance of one’s own body.
Shame
Shame reveals to myself my selfhood as an object for another (Sartre 1943).
Shame means to be utterly exposed to the present, to the painful presence of their devaluating gazes, to annihilating disdain and contempt (Fuchs 2002).
Shame lowers the person’s self-respect, and may entail either the person’s wish to hide or disappear or, more positively, attempts to reconstruct or improve oneself (Williams 1933).
Shame
Shame is an affect that awakens and focuses my attention.
When I feel ashamed, I am aware of being seen by another person whose gaze uncovers a part of who I am, usually a part that makes me feel embarrassed, inadequate, dishonored and humiliated.
The effect of shame is that it reduces the complexity of the person that I am to one single aspect of it: when I feel ashamed I know that for the other I am nothing but that specific feature of the complexities of who I am.
Body as Otherness
One’s body as the most intimate form of Otherness
Involuntary aspects in human existence: body,world, others, history
The body as facticity and contingency
Dialectics between oneself and one’s own body
Body as facticity
‘Facticity’, including oneself as ‘this’ body, its form, height, weight, colour, as well as one’s past and what is actually happening.
Having been a living bodily being before, I now realize that I have a material (impeding, clumsy, vulnerable, finite, etc.) body.
Body as a task
The material body is transcendental to me.
It is an attribute that I can/must modify.
=> Techno-body
The culture of late modernity promises that one can modify one’s own material body at one’s own will.
Phenomenology of ED(s)
Part Two
Experimental phenomenologyFactor 1: “Feeling oneself only
through the gaze of the other and defining oneself only through the evaluation of the other” (GEO)
Factor 2: “Feeling oneself only through objective measures” (OM)
Factor 3: “Feeling extraneous from one’s own body” (EB)
Factor 4: “Feeling oneself through starvation” (S).
Factor 1: “Feeling oneself only through the gaze of the other and defining oneself only through the evaluation of the other” (GEO)
Knowing what the others think of me calms me down (15) 0.79 I can’t stand not to know what the others think of me (18) 0.89 For me it’s very important to see myself through the eyes of
the others (1) 0.80 When I meet someone I can’t stay without knowing what he
thinks of me (23) 0.78 I am dependent on the evaluation of the others (13) 0.91 Even if I think that the way the others evaluate me is wrong, I
can’t do without it (16) 0.86 The way I feel depends on the way I feel looked at by the
others (11) 0.82 Sometimes I focalize myself through the gaze of the others (7)
0.70 Seeing myself from their point of view me makes me feel very
anxious (8) 0.72
Factor 2: “Feeling oneself only through objective measures” (OM)
Having control on my weight means having control on the possible changes that happen in my body (21) 0.89
Only if I have my weight under control being looked at by the others makes me fell allright (10) 0.85
Having my weight under control makes me feel in control of my emotional states (22) 0.91
In all this confusion knowing that my weight is under control reassures me a little bit (9) 0.77
If my measures remain the same over time I feel that I am myself, if not I feel I am getting lost (5) 0.77
Factor 3: “Feeling extraneous from one’s own body” (EB)
Sometimes, the emotions I feel are extraneous to me and scare me (4) 0.80
I see myself out of focus, I don’t feel myself (14) 0.86
I see myself fuzzy/hazy, as if I had no boundaries (6) 0.79
The fear of change is an emotion that I can’t tolerate (20) 0.80
The flesh is unimportant; it doesn’t let me feel my bones (12) 0.71
Factor 4: “Feeling oneself through starvation” (S).
Eating according to my own rules is the only way to feel myself (2) 0.84
If I could not eat the way I want I would not be myself anymore (3) 0.86
If I follow your dietary prescriptions I cannot recognize myself when I look at myself in the mirror; this does not happen if I
do things in my own way (17) 0.73 Changing my own eating habits scares me
to death, as any other change in my life (19) 0.71
A tentative model
Feeling extraneous from oneself
Feeling oneself through the gaze of the other
Feeling oneself through objective measures
Feeling oneself through starvation
ED(s): Esthetic body rather than cenesthetic
No cenesthetic (pathic) basis for identity
Hyper-identification with one’s own body
One’s own body as:An object looked at by the othersAn object to be manipulated
The Buildung of one’s body is a way to build one’s identity
The dialectics of the body
Part Three
The dialectics of the body
I am this body, but also I am not just this body
I am this body, but also I have that body
The paradoxical body in melancholia
Strcture of hyper-identification (with one’s own body)
Object-body-that-I-amParadoxical Lived Körper
This-nessLiving dead
ABE(s) in Schizophrenia
That-ness
Dynamization of bodily boundaries: 16 patients
Dynamization of body construction: 13 patients
Externalization: 11 patients Morbid Objectivization or Devitalization: 14
patients Pain-like experiences: 6 patients Dysmorphic-like experiences: 9 patients
Hypochondria: hyper-esthesic body
One’s body lived hyper-esthesically => becomes an object for bio-medicine
Bio-medicine is collusive to this