Objectification is a real problem in medicine that can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine: the patient’s body should be viewed as a biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. Listening to the patient’s illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his (...) complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far mainly been identifying the back sides of objectification in medicine, in this paper the aim is to analyze differences between detrimental objectifications and objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity but, rather, at least in some cases, may lead the patient to feel more at home with his body. (shrink)

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

Aims and Objectives. This article uses the concept of embodiment to demonstrate a conceptual approach to applied phenomenology. -/- Background. Traditionally, qualitative researchers and healthcare professionals have been taught phenomenological methods, such as the epoché, reduction, or bracketing. These methods are typically construed as a way of avoiding biases so that one may attend to the phenomena in an open and unprejudiced way. However, it has also been argued that qualitative researchers and healthcare professionals can benefit from phenomenology’s well-articulated theoretical (...) framework, which consists of core concepts, such as selfhood, empathy, temporality, spatiality, affectivity, and embodiment. -/- Design. This is a discursive article that demonstrates a conceptual approach to applied phenomenology. -/- Method. To outline and explain this approach to applied phenomenology, the Discussion section walks the reader through four stages of phenomenology, which progress incrementally from the most theoretical to the most practical. -/- Discussion. Part one introduces the philosophical concept of embodiment, which can be applied broadly to any human subject. Part two shows how philosophically trained phenomenologists use the concept of embodiment to describe general features of illness and disability. Part three illustrates how the phenomenological concept of embodiment can inform empirical qualitative studies and reflects on the challenges of integrating philosophy and qualitative research. Part four turns to phenomenology’s application in clinical practice and outlines a workshop model that guides clinicians through the process of using phenomenological concepts to better understand patient experience. -/- Conclusion and Relevance to Clinical Practice. A conceptual approach to applied phenomenology provides a valuable alternative to traditional methodological approaches. Phenomenological concepts provide a foundation for better understanding patient experience in both qualitative health research and clinical practice, and therefore provide resources for enhancing patient care. (shrink)

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’. (shrink)

Seen as contributing to human enhancement, implanted technologies have recently been receiving a lot of attention. However, reflections on these technologies have taken the shape of rather speculative ethical judgments on “hyped” technological devices. On the other hand, while science and technology studies and philosophy of technology have a long tradition of analyzing how technological artifacts and tools transform and configure our lives, they tend to focus on use configurations rather than the intimate relations brought about by implanted technologies. Even (...) the cyborg has lost some of its hermeneutic power as it has been detached from its material grounds, becoming a discursive entity. In this article, I reclaim the importance of materiality and explore how people live with spinal cord stimulation, which is a type of neuromodulation technology. Implanted in bodies and seemingly out of sight, this technology does not cease to matter. Embodiment and incorporation are crucial for people to live well with SCS. Embodying the neuromodulation technology entails groping processes in which gestures are central and an increased intimacy with one’s bodily materiality. Incorporating it is highly relational and entangled with the bodies of loved and distant ones, humans and nonhumans. (shrink)

Despite considerable growth in understanding of various aspects of sporting and exercise embodiment over the last decade, in-depth investigations of embodied affectual experiences in running remain limited. Furthermore, within the corpus of literature investigating pleasure and the hedonic dimension in running, much of this research has focused on experiences of pleasure in relation to performance and achievement, or on specific affective states, such as enjoyment, derived after completing a run. We directly address this gap in the qualitative literature on sporting (...) and exercise embodiment by contributing novel insights on the mind-body pleasures of running via focusing analytic attention towards the pleasures recalled by runners as experienced during positive, rewarding running experiences. Applying conceptual insights drawn from sociological phenomenology, we analyse data from an in-depth, event-focused interview study with distance runners who reported positive, rewarding experiences in recent recreational runs. Through reflexive thematic analysis, we present findings in relation to three themes: (1) ‘running feels like it should’; (2) sensory engagements; and (3) time out. The study contributes fresh perspectives, both conceptually and in relation to data-collection approach, to a small literature on the lived experience of pleasure in sport, exercise and physical cultures. (shrink)

The global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of teleconsultation (consultation between the patient and the doctor via video platforms). While it has some obvious benefits and drawbacks for both the patient and the doctor, it is important to consider—how teleconsultation impacts the quality of the patient-doctor relationship? I will approach this question through the lens of phenomenology of the body, focusing on the question—what happens to the patient objectification in teleconsultation? To answer this question I will (...) adopt a phenomenological approach combining both insights drawn from the phenomenological tradition, i.e., the concepts of the lived body and the object body, and the results from the phenomenologically informed qualitative research study on the patient experience of teleconsultation. The theoretical background against which I have developed this study comprises discussions within the field of phenomenology of medicine regarding the different sources of patient objectification within clinical encounter and the arguments concerning the negative impact that objectification has on the quality of care. I will argue that a factor that has frequently been identified within phenomenology of medicine as the main source of patient objectification in clinical encounters, namely, the internalized gaze of the clinician, is diminished during teleconsultation, increasing patient’s sense of agency, decreasing her sense of alienation and opening up the possibility for a closer relationship between the patient and the health care provider, all of which lead to the transformation of the hierarchical patient-health care professional relationship. (shrink)

The article examines how some culturally shared and corporeally enacted beliefs and norms about sexed and racialized embodiment can form embodied agency, and this with the aid of the concepts of incorporation and excorporation. It discusses how the phenomenological concept of excorporation can help us examine painful experiences of how one's lived body breaks in the encounter with others. The article also examines how a continuous excorporation can result in bodily alienation, and what embodied resistance can mean when one has (...) undergone or undergoes excorporation. Elaborating on the work of, among others, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Drew Leder, and Sarah Ahmed, I discuss incorporation and excorporation of beliefs and norms regarding sexual difference, such as beliefs and norms regarding female and male embodiment, through a reading of Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex. I also suggest that it is useful to understand the postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon's narrative of how he could not but attend to his own skin color while living in France in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of excorporation. Whereas these are different narratives in many ways, I regard them as helpful for clarifying what excorporation implies and what analytic work this concept can enable. (shrink)

This article addresses the question whether skiing as a nature sport enables practitioners to develop a rapport with nature, or rather estranges and insulates them from their mountainous ambiance. To address this question, I analyse a recent skiing movie from a psychoanalytical perspective and from a neuro-scientific perspective. I conclude that Jean-Paul Sartre’s classical but egocentric account of his skiing experiences disavows the technicity involved in contemporary skiing as a sportive practice for the affluent masses, which actually represents an urbanisation (...) of the sublime, symptomatic for the current era. (shrink)

A rich and multi-stranded sociology of sporting embodiment has begun to emerge in recent years. Calls have been made to analyze more deeply not only the sensory dimensions of lived sporting bodies but also the values prevailing within particular physical–cultural worlds. This article contributes to a small, developing research corpus by employing theoretical perspectives drawn from phenomenological sociology to explore cross-country runners' sensory encounters with the elemental, contoured by the values of the running lifeworlds they inhabit. Autoethnographic and autophenomenographic data (...) were collected via three research projects. Senses of touch still remain under-researched within the sporting sensorium, and here we focus on the “elemental haptics” of earth and air on our cross-country training runs. We also explore the rich, complex somatic experiences afforded by various of these elemental combinations. For runners, as for many sports participants, the haptic emerges as a key aspect of our sensuous running lifeworld. (shrink)

A key topic within the field of the phenomenology of medicine has been the relationship between body and self in illness, including discussions about the otherness and mineness of the body. The aim of this article is to distinguish between different meanings of bodily otherness and mineness in illness with reference to the interpretation of the body as “saturated phenomenon,” inspired by the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion. With the help of Marion’s ideas it is possible to distinguish between two meanings (...) of bodily otherness and of mineness (objective and non-objective forms). These distinctions support and elaborate on ideas already found in the phenomenology of medicine and offer further insights into the nature of the experience of illness. (shrink)

This thesis examines the practice of haemodialysis and kidney transplantation, the two medical therapies available for persons with kidney failure, from a phenomenological perspective. A basic assumption made in the thesis is that contemporary biomedicine is deeply embedded in the cultural, historical, economic, and political circumstances provided by the particular local, national, and transnational contexts in which it is practiced. The aim of the thesis is twofold. On the one hand, the aim is to examine the forms of person- and (...) patienthood enacted and negotiated in haemodialysis and kidney transplantation care and in the daily lives of persons with kidney failure. On the other hand, the aim is to investigate the ways in which the enacted and negotiated forms of person- and patienthood are culturally embedded and normatively charged. In order to examine and investigate this twofold aim, an empirical material has been gathered that comprises observations and in-depth interviews with patients and caregivers at four haemodialysis units, one in Riga, Latvia, and three in Stockholm, Sweden. The theoretical approach and methodology of the study is cultural and phenomenological in character, drawing on an ethnological and anthropological understanding of culture as processual and relational, and on a phenomenological understanding of personhood as embodied and intertwined with the surrounding world. The thesis shows that patients’ encounters and attempts to deal with the diagnoses and treatments associated with kidney failure are complex and often misalign them with the normatively charged orientations enacted and recommended by medicine. The complex situation that emerges when they undergo transplantation, for example, stands in stark contrast to the widespread official view of organ transplantation as a self-evidently health-bringing and normalising therapy. Through their repeated and extensive experiences of undergoing haemodialysis and living with the disease, patients eventually become able to create a synthesis between their lived experiences of their own body and their body as a medical object – what in the thesis is called a ‘sick body’ – a synthesis that allows them to reorient themselves in life and experience a sense of direction. This process relies, to a large extent, on the temporal structure that haemodialysis affords life; it is by repeatedly undergoing the treatment that patients become able to create a sick body. Even so, many of them find this temporal structure problematic; they experience it as disruptive of their control and future-orientedness and as causing an existentially difficult-to-handle boredom. The thesis also shows that the political developments and the norms prevalent in the two national contexts studied greatly affect the orientations of the treatment practices and the participants’ lives. In both Riga and Stockholm, ideals of freedom, activity, control, and self-actualisation influence what forms of patienthood and personhood are enacted. The study indicates that persons who fall ill with a serious and chronic disease only gradually become able to understand and actively cope with their differently embodied circumstances of life. This suggests that medical professionals should not too hastily enlist their patients as experts on their own bodies, but rather provide them with the time and support necessary for making repeated attempts at creating and maintaining a life with a sick body. (shrink)

Starting from a phenomenological understanding of the body, this article discusses the understanding of body awareness in health and illness. I question the common way to understand our relationship to our bodies in terms of subjective and objective perspectives on it, and furthermore, how this opposition has been used in the phenomenological literature to outline an understanding of health and illness as states where the body stays unnoticed versus resurfaces to our attention as dysfunctional. Using examples from an ongoing interview (...) study, I argue for an understanding of the dialectical interplay between body and world in our awareness, and how it can be understood as an approaching or distancing movement to body and world. I furthermore describe how the interplay between body and world effects and is effected by our existence in health and illness. Finally, I suggest what implications this new way of understanding the lived body has for health care practice in general, and for the development of a person‐centred care in particular. I suggest that we leave the dichotomous understanding of subjective and objective perspectives behind, and start to investigate how we move between different kinds of body awareness in health and illness. Illness, as a situation where that which has been taken for granted becomes questioned, can be said to be characterized by mistrust, and by a distancing from world and body. It is thus of importance for caregivers to provide the time, space and trusting atmosphere needed in order to make the approaching movement possible. (shrink)

Vivre avec la douleur neuropathique chronique lorsqu’elle est prise en charge par la stimulation de la moelle épinière (SME), laquelle est un type de technologie de neuromodulation, est une expérience dans laquelle différents vécus s’enchevêtrent. En m’appuyant sur le travail de terrain de type ethnographique que j’ai mené dans un hôpital néerlandais en 2012, je mobilise un cadre phénoménologique pour m’intéresser aux trois dimensions entrelacées qui constituent un tel vécu. Rendre compte de ce que signifie vivre avec la SME ne (...) peut se faire sans prendre en considération les expériences antérieures avec la douleur neuropathique chronique et avec la douleur neuropathique chronique prise en charge par des médicaments analgésiques. Si elles appartiennent a priori au passé, ces expériences sous-tendent ce qui peut être envisagé, et ce qui est craint, dans le présent et le futur. Alors que la douleur neuropathique chronique et la douleur neuropathique chronique prise en charge par des antalgiques perturbent l’intentionnalité corporelle de celles et ceux qui en font l’expérience (“je ne peux pas”), la SME est vécue comme une “reconstruction du monde,” lequel est, cette fois, défini par “je peux.” Un tel accomplissement n’est cependant ni aisé ni absolu. Au contraire, il exige qu’une attention soutenue soit portée au corps et à ses sensations. De même, bien vivre avec la douleur neuropathique chronique prise en charge par la SME demande un “travail de désenchevêtrement” (Oudshoorn, 2020) vis-à-vis d’autres objets technologiques potentiellement dangereux et vis-à-vis du regard des autres. “Je peux / je ne peux pas” n’est pas un trait du corps douloureux uniquement; il est aussi lié aux effets invalidants de l’environnement sociomatériel, lesquels font émerger des “inadaptations / inadapté.e.s” (Garland-Thomson, 2011). (shrink)

Although by no means mainstream, phenomenological approaches to bioethics and philosophy of medicine are no longer novel. Such approaches take the lived body —as opposed to the body understood as a material, biological object —as their point of departure to offer a more robust understanding of a plurality of experiences that go far beyond those surrounding disease...

Regenerative Medicine promises to develop treatments to regrow healthy tissues and cure the physical body. One of the emerging developments within this field is regenerative implants, such as jawbone or heart valve implants, that can be broken down by the body and are gradually replaced with living tissue. Yet challenges for embodiment are to be expected, given that the implants are designed to integrate deeply into the tissue of the living body, so that implant and body become one. In this (...) paper, we explore how regenerative implants may affect the embodied experience of implant recipients. To this end, we take a phenomenological approach. First, we explore what insights the existing phenomenological and empirical literature on embodiment offers regarding the experience of illness and of living with regular (non-regenerative) implants and organ transplants. Second, we apply these insights to better understand how future implant recipients might experience living with regenerative implants. Third, we conclude that concepts and considerations from the existing phenomenological literature do not sufficiently address what it might be like to live with an implantable technology that, over time, becomes one with the living body. We argue that the interwovenness and intimate relationship of people living with regenerative implants should be understood in terms of ‘entanglement’. Entanglement allows us to explore the complexities of human-technology relations, acknowledging the inseparability of humans and implantable technologies. Our theoretical foundations regarding the role of embodiment may be tested empirically once more people will be living with regenerative implants. (shrink)

Despite the growing literature on childhood obesity and lifestyle intervention programmes focusing on weight loss, few studies have examined young persons’ experiences of being identified as candidates for such programmes and of participating in them. This paper does so. Juxtaposing insights from phenomenology with an approach inspired by Foucault, the paper shows how teenage girls’ bodily self-perception and bodily self-awareness are shaped in intercorporeal assemblages comprising other people and specific features or elements of the lifestyle programme.Inspired by van Manen’s hermeneutic-phenomenological (...) approach, with its point of departure in lived experience, this paper draws on interviews with Norwegian teenage girls participating in the same lifestyle programme and identifies three core thematic aspects of the girls’ experiences: being identified as a candidate for a lifestyle programme and not wanting this; negotiating the lack of weight loss and the scales; and bodily situated agency – feeling good and being able. Permeating all three themes are two central, interrelated phenomena: agency and resistance. Furthermore, the paper shows how a combination of Foucauldian insights and a phenomenological understanding of intercorporeality can help to shed light on the power, affective, material and temporal dimensions of dys-appearance (i.e., when one’s body appears as bad or wrong), as well as those of eu-appearance (i.e., when one’s body appears as healthy or strong), and thus contribute to the understanding of the girls’ narrated lived experiences.On the basis of these findings, we argue that weight-related treatment goals are not necessarily compatible with the strengthening of adolescents’ body images and self-esteem. However, whilst being obliged to attend to their bodies while in the programme, the girls also encountered unexpected, positive bodily feelings and experiences. Such events, we suggest, offer a means of resisting the more troubling dys-appearing bodily situations our participants described so powerfully. (shrink)

The article argues that young infants’ felt needs are articulated and discernible experiences. So, instead of undifferentiated feelings, young infants have some sort of variety of need-experiences. In the article, infantile needs are specified as feelings of dissatisfaction. The article argues against the view that instances of dissatisfying feelings would be initially experienced by the infants as undifferentiated feelings of discomfort despite corresponding to a variety of observable behaviors and postures (related to, for instance, hunger, thirst, restlessness, or seeking attachment). (...) Two arguments are brought forth in the article. The embodiment argument claims that feelings of dissatisfaction must be thought as embodied experiences. The experiential sense of these feelings involves as a constituent part a proprioceptive sense of one’s body. As embodied experiences, then, these feelings are specific and varying. The ontogenetic argument suggests that the development of the feelings of dissatisfaction issued by care-interventions can be better understood, if these feelings entail a sort of rudimentary experiential organization from the start. Thus, the article suggests that there is no “single general-purpose model” of the infant’s need-experiences, as some emotion theorists suggest with respect to emotions. This has implications with respect to developmental theories which account for young infants’ experiences of needs and their satisfaction, such as that of Donald Winnicott. (shrink)

The first decisive steps of medicine towards becoming a science in its present shape happen to coincide with “the rise of the novel” in the eighteenth century. Before this well known and in our days still growing scientific specialization of medicine, the connections between literature and medicine were both many and close. By reading and analyzing a contemporary novel, The Death of a Beekeeper by the Swedish author Lars Gustafsson (1978), this article is an attempt to explore to which extent (...) a fictional narrative about a unique case of cancer may illuminate challenges associated with the experience of serious illness. Our claim is that medicine might draw wisdom from literature, its ability to create connections through narrative, to illuminate the complexity of ethical dilemmas, and to intertwine symptoms, life stories, and contexts. We argue that by being in the company of literary narratives and philosophical questions, physicians as well as other health care professionals may acquire clinically relevant skills which help them reach the ethically defined goals of their profession. (shrink)

While health care professionals advise those who have undergone weight loss surgery to increase their levels of physical activity, research suggests that often this is not achieved. This paper explores the experiences of ten Norwegian women as they engaged in physical activity several years after weight loss surgery. In contrast to the existing literature, which explores physical activity post-WLS largely in terms of quantitative data and measurable outcomes, the present study sought to explore women’s lived experiences of physical activity, including (...) the meanings they ascribed to different forms of activity and how such meanings changed over time. The research participants, all of whom had undergone WLS more than five years earlier, described the meanings they attached to becoming physically active, as well as the different activities and movement practices they engaged in, from interval training to mountain hiking and yoga. For all the women, maintaining and increasing their level of physical activity was challenging. On the one hand, engaging in exercise after weight loss improved their sense of joy and well-being and expanded their opportunities to move and act. On the other hand, during physical activity they needed to be constantly alert to symptoms of post-surgical side-effects, including variable energy levels, digestive problems and acute illness episodes. As the women explored their new capacities, it seemed to be important for them to explore various forms of physical activity in order to find the form of exercise which best suited them or which they most enjoyed. In some cases, they constructed new meanings around activities which, prior to surgery, had seemed onerous and bereft of pleasure. We argue that such insights will benefit health professionals who provide advice on physical activity at different post-surgical stages, sometimes to persons seriously concerned about regaining weight. (shrink)

This article critically explores the tension between perceptions of weight loss surgery as a last resort and as a tool. This tension stems from patients’ doubt and insecurity whether expectations for a healthy life will come through. Thus, even after surgery, traditional weight loss methods, including diets and exercise, are considered paramount. Drawing on a series of interviews with Norwegian women, we argue that the commercialization of weight loss surgeries as well as the moral stigmas attached to such operations serve (...) to perpetuate this tension. More specifically, the women were advised to leave their old habits behind, and embrace a healthier and more active lifestyle. In such a climate, we argue that undergoing surgery without subsequently embodying dietary and exercise norms is hardly an option. On the contrary, these become a moral obligation that modern women need to relate to—and perhaps negotiate—in order to repudiate stigmas attached to weight loss surgeries as a quick fix for those incapable of losing weight in the “proper” manner. (shrink)

This collection features comprehensive overviews of the various ethical challenges in organ transplantation. International readings well-grounded in the latest developments in the life sciences are organized into systematic sections and engage with one another, offering complementary views. All core issues in the global ethical debate are covered: donating and procuring organs, allocating and receiving organs, as well as considering alternatives. Due to its systematic structure, the volume provides an excellent orientation for researchers, students, and practitioners alike to enable a deeper (...) understanding of some of the most controversial issues in modern medicine. (shrink)

In this paper, I will provide a phenomenological analysis of somatic obsessions at times present in obsessive–compulsive disorder. I will compare two different types of bodily obsessions, which have a different neurological-physiological underpinning: anguishing awareness of one’s own heartbeat and of one’s own breathing. In addition, I will contrast these two with how one experiences one’s own liver. I will use the concepts "tactility obsessions” and "motility obsessions”, which I have coined for the purpose of this comparison. In other words, (...) these are obsessions concerning the felt sense of one’s autonomous organs and obsessions concerning one’s ability to voluntarily move. Ultimately, I claim that the core lived experience in somatic obsessive–compulsive disorder should not only be understood as having to do with intruding and "distorted thoughts” concerning bodily processes, but could also be understood as having to do with a felt sense of our organs interrupting and intruding our daily lives. (shrink)

Analyses of assisted reproductive technologies have demonstrated how objectification and agency can coexist in infertility centres. How objectification creates opportunities for empowerment, however, has not yet been explored. In analysing women’s narratives of assisted conception in Colombian infertility clinics, I demonstrate the complexity in women’s embodied experiences of various objectifying stages of assisted conception and argue that their experiences produced multiple forms of embodied agency. Women used diagnostic procedures to learn about their bodies and infertility complications, which augmented their authority (...) over their bodies and treatment. They drew upon their embodied knowledge to reduce treatment anxieties, while sensations such as pain were made purposeful, and hence meaningful, as women strove to reconfigure the significance of the embodied sensations of conception in a context of medicalized reproduction. In these narratives, we see that lived bodies are productive agents of social change, generating meanings and working to reshape dominant social understandings. (shrink)

Artificial devices that functionally replace internal organs are likely to be more common in the future. They are becoming more and more technologically feasible, increases in chronic diseases that can compromise various organs are anticipated, and donor organs will remain necessarily limited. More people in the future may have bodies that are partly nonorganic. How might artificial organs affect how we experience and conceptualize our bodies and how we understand the relation of the body to the experiencing, acting subject, or (...) self? Here, I focus on artificial heart devices (AHDs), including total artificial hearts (TAHs) and ventricular assist devices (VADs). While other devices, such as pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, assist the heart, I focus on devices that replace rather than assist organic function. AHDs, I argue, may have two opposing effects. On the one hand, having an AHD could alter experience, seemingly confirming that selves are shaped by the specifics of embodiment. On the other hand, AHDs are likely to encourage people to regard bodies as machines that are separable from the self. AHDs thus both confirm and undermine a body-self dualism. People with these devices may come to regard their bodies as machinelike even while having an artificial part alters their subjective experience. (shrink)

In this paper I will try to systematically lay out and describe the multiple dimensions of the embodied experience of illness, which until recently has been the main focus within the field of the phenomenology of medicine. In order to do this, I will turn to analysis of the nature of embodiment in Husserl’s phenomenology. I will argue that based on Husserl’s phenomenology of the body, one can distinguish four ways of experiencing one’s body, or four dimensions of embodiment. I (...) will distinguish between experience of one’s body as 1) a bearer of sensations ; 2) a seat of free movement, characterized by the faculty of “I can” ; 3) a material thing in a causal relationship with the material world ; 4) a material thing embedded in a social context. I will then apply the proposed classification of dimensions of embodiment to the experience of illness, focusing on the various ways these dimensions have been used within the phenomenology of medicine. This serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides a framework for classification of the existing interpretations of the experience of illness; secondly, it opens up a way for a comprehensive analysis of the experience of illness which includes both individual and social aspects of embodiment as well as their mutual intertwining. (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary phenomenology of medicine has been devoted to accounts of health and illness, arguing that they contribute to the improvement of health care. Less focus has been paid to the issue of prevention of disease and the associated difficulty of adhering to health-promoting behaviours, which is arguably of equal importance. This article offers a phenomenological account of this disease prevention, focusing on how we—as embodied beings—engage with health-promoting behaviours. It specifically considers how we engage with (...) oral hygiene regimens to prevent periodontitis and why we are not good at it. The article suggests that poor adherence to health-promoting behaviours can be explained with reference to the concept of the absent body, because prevention of disease is generally concerned with pre-symptomatic illness experience. The final section contains a discussion of some strategies for the improvement of disease prevention based on this viewpoint. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore bodily changes following weight loss surgery. Our empirical material is based on individual interviews with 22 Norwegian women. To further analyze their experiences, we build primarily on the phenomenologist Drew Leder`s distinction between bodily dis-appearance and dys-appearance. Additionally, our analysis is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. Although these scholars have not directed their attention to obesity operations, they occupy a prime framework for shedding light on different dimensions of (...) bodily change. In doing so, we were able to identify two main themes: The felt “inner” body versus the visible “surface” body and the “old” body versus the “new” body. In different, though interconnected ways, these main themes encompass tensions between changes the women experienced as contributing to a more “normal” and active life, feeling more accepted, and changes that generated ambivalence. In particular, their skin became increasingly problematic because it did not “shrink” like the rest of the body. On the contrary, it became looser and looser. Moreover, badsmelling folds of skin that wobbled, sweated and chafed at the smallest movement, aprons of fat hanging in front of their stomachs, batwing arms, thick flabby thighs and sagging breasts were described as a huge contrast to the positive response they received to their changed body shape when they were out and about with their clothes on. At the same time, they expressed ambivalence with regards to removing the excess skin by means of plastic surgery. Through their own and other women`s experiences they learned removing the excess skin by means of surgery could be a double-edged sword. By illuminating the experiences of the ones undergoing such changes our article offers new insight in a scholarly debate predominated by medical research documenting the positive outcomes of weight loss surgery. (shrink)

From a medical perspective, exercise and physical activity are valuable tools for losing weight, through an increase in energy expenditure. However, beyond this instrumental value, physical activity has meaning for the person experiencing it. Among individuals categorized as obese, that meaning is often problematic. The aim of this paper is to produce essential knowledge about one young man's embodied experiences of practicing martial art. Through a phenomenological analysis of research material concerning the young man’s passionate relationship to martial arts, we (...) identify ways in which someone who has a body often regarded negatively, might still derive great pleasure from his movement experiences. (shrink)

This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC can entail a radically altered self-world relation. We identify two examples of pre-intentional (existential) feelings: that of listlessness and that of not being able (...) to sense what is real and not real, both of which, in different ways, imply a changed self-world relation. We offer an analysis of intentional feelings: how the fear of not “returning” to one’s previous self and the hope of such a return weave together the present and the absent, as well as the past and the future, in ways that make the future appear as constricted, disquieting, or lost. We argue that a phenomenological differentiation among experiences of living with symptoms indicative of PCC—through attention to the way intentional affectivity and pre-intentional affectivity help shape the embodied self’s attunement to the world—is apt to yield a better understanding of the variations within these experiences and contribute to clinical practice. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to illuminate the significance of the long-term influence of bodily changes on the perception of self after stroke by means of narrative interviews with 23 stroke survivors. A phenomenological-hermeneutic approach inspired by the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur is the methodological framework. Zahavi’s understanding of the embodied self and Leder’s concept of dys-appearance along with earlier research on identity guide the comprehensive understanding of the theme. The meaning of bodily changes after stroke can be (...) understood as living with an altered perception of self. Stroke survivors perceive their bodies as fragile, unfamiliar and unreliable and tend to objectify them. The weak and discomforting body that ‘cannot’ demands constant, comprehensive awareness to keep itself in play. These long-term and often permanent consequences of bodily weakness may turn stroke survivors’ intentionality inwards, away from external activities and projects and relationships with others. Negative judgements from others are added to lost roles and positions and threaten the vulnerable self. Stroke survivors try to regain familiarity with their body by their life-long project of testing its boundaries. Mastering important tasks helps them strengthen their self-concept. Health care workers should be aware of the embodied self and engage in long-term dialogues with stroke survivors to strengthen positive perceptions of body and self. More research is needed to understand destructive post-stroke phenomena such as fatigue and pain and to find effective methods to help stroke survivors regain wholeness of body and self. (shrink)