Let's Get Personal, Let's Get Physical: Approaching the Bodily Self in Clinical Interactions.
Constanze Hausteiner-wiehle, Peter Henningsen
Psychopathology January 1, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.1159/000521532 via PubMed
Summary
Medicine often adopts a detached, fragmented view of the body as a mere biological machine, while psychotherapy may overlook the body by focusing solely on mind and behavior. The intersection of being a person and having a body is crucial for health and illness. This work briefly reviews embodiment and enactivism, then proposes practical approaches for clinical diagnostics to better understand the bodily self.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | Understanding the bodily self through embodiment and enactivism can improve clinical diagnostics by bridging the gap between biomedical and psychotherapeutic perspectives. |
Abstract
Medicine usually looks at the body as a biochemical and physical apparatus - from a distant third-person perspective, with fragmented, reductionist positions, unidirectional causal models, and highly selective foci. Even psychiatrists and psychotherapists focus more and more on the brain as an organ, look at genes and colourful pictures. And just as biomedical medicine stares at physical and chemical facts and ignores the person, one could say that psychotherapy stares at personality, cognition, and behaviour and ignores the body. But the lowlands where being-a-person and having-a-body meetmatter a lot for becoming ill, staying, and getting well. What attitudes and what approaches can help us understand the bodily self? After very briefly summarizing current understandings of embodiment and enactivism, we will suggest some practical consequences for everyday clinical diagnostics.