Body Schema

This article argues for a more rigorous distinction between body extensions on the one hand and incorporation of non-bodily objects into the body on the other hand. Real re-embodiment would be a matter of taking things (most often technologies) into the body, i.e. of incorporation of non-bodily items into the body. This, however, is a difficult process often limited by a number of conditions of possibility that are absent in the case of 'mere' body extensions. Three categories are discussed: limb extensions/prostheses, perceptual extensions/prostheses and cognitive extensions/prostheses. For each category, a distinction between extensions and incorporations is proposed, and the conditions of possibility for real incorporation are discussed. These conditions of possibility differ in each category, but in general they ask for radical or fundamental alterations not only in the motor and/or sensory or cognitive constitution of a human subject, but also in his or her subjective experience.

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), or xenomelia, is a failure to integrate a fully functional limb into a coherent body schema. It manifests as the desire for amputation of the particular limb below an individually stable 'demarcation line.' Here we show, in five individuals with xenomelia, defective temporal order judgments to two tactile stimuli, one proximal, the other distal of the demarcation line. Spatio-temporal integration, known to be mediated by the parietal lobes, was biased towards the undesired body part, apparently capturing the individual's attention in a pathologically exaggerated way. This finding supports the view of xenomelia as a parietal lobe syndrome.

Handbooks of human communication describe personal distance as a protective bubble surrounding our body and stress the role of sex (along with other cultural and situational factors) in stretching and shrinking it. Using data from a simulated dyadic interaction procedure, we show that putative effects of sex may be explained by effects of one's arm length in same-sex and different-sex interactions. This suggests that biological factors related to the body schema provide the crucial constraints on the use of personal space for communication.

I. Psychosomatic Medicine: A Critical Appraisal:

The modern medical practitioner attempts to account for the various aspects of illness by considering them all together and, in doing so, adopts a biopsychosocial approach. As a general medical orientation, psychosomatic medicine finds its main purpose in pursuing such an approach.

The psychosomatic physician postulates "that mind and body are two inseparably linked aspects of man" ([9], p. 12). Such an approach is 'holistic', "in that it implies a view of the human organism as a whole, a mind-body complex" ([9], p. 12). Lipowski distinguishes several themes in current psychosomatics: the search for physiological mediating pathways between psyche and soma in fields such as neuro-endocrinology and neuroimmunology; the search for correlations of psychological "stress" and physiological effect; and the investigation of the psychosocial response to physical illness ([9],' pp. 8-9). In addition, psychosomatics is concerned with the interaction of psychological, social and physiological factors in health and illness and with the therapeutic consequences issuing from this holistic, i.e., biopsychosocial view ([9], p. 12). According to Lipowski, in psychosomatics, the "old" notion of causality is abandoned and replaced by the notion of "reciprocal interaction" so that it is impossible to say that physical events are caused by psychological events, or vice versa ([9], p. 14). Since every illness is invariably physiological' as well as psychological, all disorders are psychosomatic and there is no privileged list of psychosomatic disorders. Ironically, if this were to be generally acknowledged, the very term "psychosomatic" would be quite superfluous [22,.23]. .

But given the holistic starting point of the psychosomatic approach, how can medical research effectively proceed? Out of his concern that holism cannot conceivably allow for research, Lipowski sees a need to split and reduce this holism through "methodological reductionism":

"Furthermore, one needs to draw a distinction between methodological and theoretical reductionism. The former implies a research strategy involving a deliberate decision to abstract from, and hence disregard one or two classes of variables so as to be able to study the effects on behavior of variables belonging to only one class, say biological or psychological. This is a heuristically .valuable investigative strategy, one that appears indispensable for progress in our field ([10], p. 61)."

Hence, psychosomatics can be characterized by a holistic (i.e., biopsychosocial) starting point, the abandonment of classical "causality", psychophysiological correlations and methodological reductionism.

We may ask if this psychosomatic approach is able to offer a genuinely complete account of patients and their environment in health and in illness. And if not, are we able to suggest an alternative?

Reports of phantom limbs amongst aplasics (i.e., subjects who congenitally lack one or several limbs) have often been presented as evidence that body image is Ôhard-wiredÕ in the brain and that neither sensory input nor proprioceptive feedback are essential to its formation. Although attempts have been made to account for these phantoms by other means, these have been on a case by case basis and no satisfactory alternative framework has been proposed. This paper collates the accounts of aplasic phantoms and presents them as compatible with a four-part hypothesis, in which body image is learnt from experience during both pre-and post-natal development, and in which cross-cortical connections and mirror neurons play prominent roles. This model unites several previously disparate theories to offer a viable solution to several longstanding phantom limb mysteries and serves to highlight avenues worthy of further inquiry.

As we move about and interact in the world, we keep track of different spaces, among them the space of navigation, the space immediately around the body, and the space of the body. We review research showing that these spaces are conceptualized differently. Knowledge of the space of navigation is systematically distorted. For example, people mentally rotate roads and land masses to greater correspondence with global reference frames, they mentally align roads and land masses, they overestimate distances near the viewpoint relative to those far from it. These and other distortions indicate that the space of navigation is schematized to elements and spatial relations relative to reference frames and perspective. The space around the body is organized into a mental framework consisting of extensions of the major axes of the body. Times to report objects around the body suggest that the relative accessibility of the axes depends on their perceptual and functional properties and the relation of the body to the world. Finally, times to verify named or depicted body parts indicate that body schemas depend on perceptual and functional significance. Thus, these spaces (and they are not the only ones important to human interaction) differ from one another and are not conceptualized as Euclidean. Rather they are schematized into elements and spatial relations that reflect perceptual and conceptual significance. Key Words: cognitive map, body schema, mental model, spatial thinking.

In this chapter, I review the origins and nature of phenomenology and delineate some of its key philosophical assumptions. I then indicate the relevance of phenomenological research for interior design by focusing on the three themes of place, environmental embodiment, and architectural sustenance. I emphasize that a major value of phenomenological research for interior design is revealing aspects of environmental and place experience that are typically unnoticed so that they might be pondered and made better use of in the design process.

Using a weekly outdoor marketplace in Varberg, Sweden, as a real-world example, this article explores the phenomenological notion of place ballet--the interaction of individuals' habitual actions and routines in space, which becomes place. Varberg is a coastal town of about 20,000 located about fifty miles south of Gothenburg.  Varberg's outdoor maket has stood in the same place in the center of town for some 400 years and operates throughout the year on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Drawing on photographic, interview, and participant-observational materials, the authors identify two underlying patterns in Varberg's place ballet--regularity and unexpectedness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJfpa9vv9pg

This presentation considers how the phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) contributes to an understanding of architecture and place experience via his emphasis on the lived body. The focus is on architect Thomas Thiis-Evensen's " architectural archetypes " and architectural theorist Bill Hillier's " space syntax. " The presentation highlights three claims: First, that Thiis-Evensen provides a language for locating unself-conscious, visceral aspects of buildings & architectural meaning (Merleau-Ponty's perception and phenomenal field); second, that Hilllier illustrates how the spatiality of place—i.e., pathway configuration— supports or inhibits particular actions & routines of lived bodies as they come together or remain apart spatially (Merleau-Ponty's body-subject and intercorporeality); and, third, that both Thiis-Evensen & Hillier illustrate ways via architecture and place whereby pre-reflective bodily awareness and actions play an important role in the lifeworld (Merleau-Ponty's emphasis on the lived body as intentional but pre-reflective agent).

This book,  A Geography of the Lifeworld (1979), focuses on a wide-ranging phenomenon labelled everyday environmental experience—the sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with the geographical world in which they live. By geographical world is meant the everyday places, spaces, and environments in which people find themselves. The source of experiential descriptions was environmental experience groups, small focus groups of students and other interested participants who were willing to meet weekly to examine in their own daily experience such themes as movement patterns, emotions relating to place, the nature of noticing and attention, the meaning of home and at-homeness, places for things, deciding where to go when, and so forth.

Through a phenomenological explication of the more than 1,500 personal observations offered in these environmental experience groups, the study identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on movement examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject. The section on rest explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s final section on encounter considers the multifaced ways in which people make attentive contact with their world. Group observations indicate that this range of awareness extends from obliviousness and minimal attentive contact with the world at hand through watching, noticing, and more intense kinds of encounter where the experiencer, at least metaphorically, feels a sense of “merging” with some aspect of world.

The last section of the book examines lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

This paper explores philosophical and strategic possibilities to understand the concept of co-Ability, and generate critical and new insights to our value system in human centred societal challenges. I apply an experimental approach of research through design, analysed from an interpretive point of view to prove a grounded theory. The paper starts from a prosthesis development presented as a tangible pragmatic procedure. The purpose of the case study is the notion of care through practical design that is marked with concern since the probability of harm can be incised by pure design decisions. Instead of describing the politics of roles and ethics in a situation characterised by 'design for care' inspirations, I use reflection on design practice to understand embodied thoughts concerning relationships and the ways of doing. In the second part of the paper, I proceed with literature review in disability research and parallel design strategies. In the final section-in relation to co-design-I introduce the term of 'co-Ability' that is rooted in the critical approach of posthuman disability studies outlined by scholars such as Rosi Braidotti. It serves as a broad umbrella term under which we can reconsider the potentials of various entities (biological and artificial) enhancing the shared competence rather than dwelling on the oppressive nature of human-centred norms.

The body, as the common ground for objectivity and (inter)subjectivity, is a phenomenon with a perplexing plurality of registers. Therefore, this innovative volume offers an interdisciplinary approach from the fields of neuroscience, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of body image and body schema have a firm tradition in each of these disciplines and make up the conceptual anchors of this volume.
Challenged by neuropathological phenomena, neuroscience has dealt with body image and body schema since the beginning of the twentieth century. Halfway through the twentieth century, phenomenology was inspired by child development and elaborated a specifically phenomenological account of body image and schema. Starting from the mirror stage, this source of inspiration is shared with psychoanalysis which develops the concept of body image in interaction with the clinic of the singular subject. In this volume, the creative encounter of these three perspectives on the body opens up present-day paths for conceptualisation, research and (clinical) practice.

How the Body Shapes the Mind is an interdisciplinary work that addresses philosophical questions by appealing to evidence found in experimental psychology, neuroscience, studies of pathologies, and developmental psychology. There is a growing consensus across these disciplines that the contribution of embodiment to cognition is inescapable. Because this insight has been developed across a variety of disciplines, however, there is still a need to develop a common vocabulary that is capable of integrating discussions of brain mechanisms in neuroscience, behavioral expressions in psychology, design concerns in artificial intelligence and robotics, and debates about embodied experience in the phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Shaun Gallagher's book aims to contribute to the formulation of that common vocabulary and to develop a conceptual framework that will avoid both the overly reductionistic approaches that explain everything in terms of bottom-up neuronal mechanisms, and inflationistic approaches that explain everything in terms of Cartesian, top-down cognitive states. Gallagher pursues two basic sets of questions. The first set consists of questions about the phenomenal aspects of the structure of experience, and specifically the relatively regular and constant features that we find in the content of our experience. If throughout conscious experience there is a constant reference to one's own body, even if this is a recessive or marginal awareness, then that reference constitutes a structural feature of the phenomenal field of consciousness, part of a framework that is likely to determine or influence all other aspects of experience. The second set of questions concerns aspects of the structure of experience that are more hidden, those that may be more difficult to get at because they happen before we know it. They do not normally enter into the content of experience in an explicit way, and are often inaccessible to reflective consciousness. To what extent, and in what ways, are consciousness and cognitive processes, which include experiences related to perception, memory, imagination, belief, judgement, and so forth, shaped or structured by the fact that they are embodied in this way?

REFERENCE:: David Seamon, Merleau-Ponty, Lived Body and Place: Toward a Phenomenology of Human Situatedness, a chapter in T. Hünefeldt and A. Schlitte (eds.), Situatedness and Place (pp. 41-66). Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2018.

ABSTRACT: In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's understanding of perception and corporeal sensibility to consider the significance of human situatedness as expressed via place and place experience. To illustrate how Merleau-Ponty's conceptual understanding might be applied to real-world place experiences, I draw on two sources of experiential evidence, the first of which is a passage from Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez's magical-realist novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967/1970). The second source is a set of first-person observations describing events and situations that I happened to take note of during weekday walks between my home and university office over the course of several months. My aim is to use these two narrative accounts as a means to illustrate, via vignettes of everyday human experience, Merleau-Ponty's central concepts of perception, body-subject, and lived embodiment. I contend that these accounts substantiate Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological claims and point to additional significant elements of human situatedness and place experience.

A Portuguese translation of this chapter by Andre Pinto is available here at academia.edu at:

https://www.academia.edu/42134992/Merleau-Ponty_Lived_Body_and_Place_Toward_a_Phenomenology_of_Human_Situatedness_-_Tradu%C3%A7%C3%A3o_em_Portugu%C3%AAs_do_Artigo_de_David_Seamon_2018_

In this chapter, I draw on French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy to explore environmental embodiment-the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its prereflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of perception, which he understands as the immediate givenness of the world founded in bodily sensibility. Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject-pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly can transform an environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character-a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I examine how qualities of the physical and designable worldfor example, materiality, form, and spatiality-contribute to the lived body's engagement with and actions in the world. I end by arguing that Merleau-Ponty offers an essential perspective for understanding the importance of place and lived emplacement in human life, but this perspective must be extended by considering how places change over time via generative processes that enliven or undermine places and lived emplacement.

Our experience of the body is not direct; rather, it is mediated by perceptual information, influenced by internal information, and recalibrated through stored implicit and explicit body representation (body memory). This paper presents an overview of the current investigations related to body memory by bringing together recent studies from neuropsychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary and cognitive psychology. To do so, in the paper, I explore the origin of representations of human body to elucidate their developmental process and, in particular, their relationship with more explicit concepts of self. First, it is suggested that our bodily experience is constructed from early development through the continuous integration of sensory and cultural data from six different representations of the body, i.e., the Sentient Body (Minimal Selfhood), the Spatial Body (Self Location), the Active Body (Agency), the Personal Body (Whole Body Ownership – Me); the Objectified Body (Objectified Self – Mine), and the Social Body (Body Satisfaction – Ideal Me). Then, it is suggested that these six representations can be combined in a coherent supramodal representation, i.e. the “body matrix”, through a predictive, multisensory processing activated by central, top–down, attentional processes. From an evolutionary perspective, the main goal of the body matrix is to allow the self to protect and extend its boundaries at both the homeostatic and psychological levels. From one perspective, the self extends its boundaries (peripersonal space) through the enactment and recognition of motor schemas. From another perspective, the body matrix, by defining the boundaries of the body, also defines where the self is present, i.e., in the body that is processed by the body matrix as the most likely to be its one, and in the space surrounding it. In the paper I also introduce and discuss the concept of “embodied medicine”: the use of advanced technology for altering the body matrix with the goal of improving our health and well-being.

The same neural structures involved in the unconscious modeling of our acting body in space also contribute to our awareness of the lived body and of the objects that the world contains. Neuroscientific research also shows that there are neural mechanisms mediating between the multi-level personal experience we entertain of our lived body, and the implicit certainties we simultaneously hold about others. Such personal and body-related experiential knowledge enables us to understand the actions performed by others, and to directly decode the emotions and sensations they experience. A common functional mechanism is at the basis of both body awareness and basic forms of social understanding: embodied simulation. It will be shown that the present proposal is consistent with some of the perspectives offered by phenomenology.

A GEOGRAPHY OF THE LIFEWORLD (1979, reprinted 2015) has been published in Chinese translation. The author wishes to thank geographers Dr. Shangyi Zhou, who initiated this project; and doctoral student Huihui Gao, who contributed to the translation. The book is published by Beijing Normal University Press. The ISBN is 978-7-303-27114-6.

While Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body proper, his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology investigate the genesis of the experience of a body as one's own. I demonstrate the uniqueness of Merleau-Ponty's account of the narcissistic affect and sociality involved in this developmental process, distinguishing his account vis-à-vis Wallon's and Lacan's studies of the mirror stage. I conclude that in Merleau-Ponty's account, (1) the experience of the body proper is not singular, but encompasses a range of phenomenological variation; and (2) the genesis of the body proper is not confined to the mirror stage. The production of bodily boundaries is an ongoing process identified not only with its advent in childhood, but also with adult emotional life. The boundaries between inner and outer domains of perception are not merely discovered, but must be negotiated and cultivated in the intercorporeal affective dramas of adult life.

The psychoanalytic setting according to José Bleger is a non-process within which the analytic process takes place, the background of a figure as in Gestalt psychology. The Spanish term is ‘encuadre’, giving rise to problems of translation which are partly conceptual. The 'ideally normal' setting, which is completely constant, can exist only as a thought experiment. Disruptions to the setting reveal that something has been silently deposited in it, which Bleger terms the 'agglutinated nucleus', equated with Bion's 'psychotic part of the personality'. In his view, the setting is a social institution, it forms part of the individual personality, and it is the undifferentiated part of the body-schema. His hypothesis of primary undifferentiation and syncretism implies a particular view of the development of the body-schema. Although he makes no distinction between 'setting and 'frame', his distinction between two settings, the patient's and the analyst's, points to the need for a concept of 'internal setting'. The implications of Bleger’s view for modified settings using telecommunications (e.g. Skype) are explored in a further thought experiment involving the use of avatars capable of generating a strong sense of presence. It is inferred that the body itself must be regarded as part of the setting, and that this includes the communication technology which is internalised as a prosthesis. Since we establish symbiotic relations with any invariant that we encounter, the psychotic part of the personality must be deposited in the bodies of both patient and analyst, and in the telecommunication system itself.

Frantz Fanon's critical adaptation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the body schema to describe the operations of colonial racism and the lived experience of racialization are well known. Less widely remarked upon is the role of affect in Fanon's account of racialization in Black Skin, White Masks. Colonial racism, in Fanon's account of it, operates not only through the influence of the historical racial schema, but also through "affective disorders." In this paper, I foreground this affective dimension of Fanon's project, offering a reading of how affect operates in Fanon's account of racialization. I position Fanon's analysis of racializing body schemas alongside his analysis of racializing affects, showing how these apparently disparate threads of his account must be understood together. Emphasizing Fanon's analysis of colonial racism as "negrophobia," I draw on psychoanalytic accounts of horror as the unique affect of phobia in order to argue that the crucial racializing affect in his account is not Sartrean shame, but horror. I compare Fanon's phenomenology of racialization with a similar one offered by Audre Lorde in her essay "Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger." I analyze in each the unique operation of racializing horror, and reread Fanon's notion of the historical racial schema in terms of a uniquely affective dimension of racializing power.

With the advance of science, the concept of " the self " as some kind of separate Cartesian entity appears increasingly implausible. Nevertheless, it is hard to dismiss the intuition that an entity which can be classified as " the self " does indeed exist, independent of the body (the dualistic stance). This paper argues that the self-body separation is enhanced by two phenomena: inner talk and self-reflections (e.g., in mirrors). In both cases there is a fundamental split between the self-as-subject and the self-as-object. Furthermore, both of these phenomena allow us to gain a third-person perspective (3PP) upon ourselves. As a result, it becomes almost impossible for one give up this 3PP and return to the primitive experience of the first-person perspective (1PP).

This book explores the long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma—particularly complex posttraumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD)—from phenomenological and cognitive perspectives. For example, C-PTSD can result in impairments at the body-schema level. In order to survive, trauma victims may conduct their lives at the body-image level, thus producing a mismatch between body schema and body image. In turn, as in the case of somatoparaphrenia and body integrity identity disorder, this incongruity can result in body disownership, which will affect long-term outcomes of severe and ongoing trauma.

This book presents a phenomenology of EVERYDAY ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERIENCE--The sum total of peoples’ firsthand involvements with their everyday places, spaces, and environments. Through a phenomenological explication of some 1,500 personal observations provided by “environmental experience groups,” the author identifies three overarching themes—movement, rest, and encounter—that appear to mark the essential lived core of everyday environmental experience.

The section on MOVEMENT examines the habitual nature of everyday environmental behaviors and argues, after French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), that the lived foundation of these behaviors is the body as preconscious but intelligent subject (“body-subject”). The section on REST explores people’s attachment to place and gives particular attention to at-homeness and positive affective relationships with places and environments.

The book’s third section on ENCOUNTER considers the multifaceted ways in which people make or do not make attentive contact with their surroundings and explores such modes of awareness as obliviousness, noticing, watching, and more intense encounters.

In the book’s concluding section, the author examines the lived relationships and interconnections among movement, rest, and encounter and argues that their threefold structure offers one simple but integrated way to envision human environmental experience conceptually and to think about design and policy implications practically.

This review article summarizes neuropsychological descriptions of abnormal body representations in brain-damaged patients and recent neuroscientific investigations of their sensorimotor underpinnings in healthy participants. The first part of the article describes unilateral disorders of the bodily self, such as asomatognosia, feelings of amputation, supernumerary phantom limbs and somatoparaphrenia, as well as descriptions of non-lateralized disorders of the bodily self, including Alice in Wonderland syndrome and autoscopic hallucinations. Because the sensorimotor mechanisms of these disorders are unclear, we focus on clinical descriptions and insist on the importance of reporting clinical cases to better understand the full range of bodily disorders encountered in neurological diseases. The second part of the article presents the advantages of merging neuroscientific approaches of the bodily self with immersive virtual reality, robotics and neuroprosthetics to foster the understanding of the multisensory, motor and neural mechanisms of bodily representations.

This paper examines ways in which a phenomenological approach might contribute to space syntax research, drawing on three themes that mark the heart of phenomenological investigation: (1) understanding grounded in real-world experience; (2) human immersion in world; and (3) describing the lifeworld—a person or group’s everyday world of taken-for-grantedness of which the person or group is typically unaware. A major phenomenological question is how space syntax concepts, particularly the spatial configuration of the “deformed grid,” point toward a particular kind of place structure in which the spatial-temporal regularity of individual participants potentially coalesces into a larger environmental dynamic—what is termed “place ballet”—that both sustains and is sustained by an attachment to and a sense of place.

Key words: body, body-subject, deformed grid, phenomenology, place, place ballet

A B S T R A C T Despite their differences, body schema and the body image representations are not only consistent in everyday life, but also sometimes consistent in pathological disorders, such as in Alice in Wonderland syndrome and anorexia nervosa. The challenge is to understand how they achieve such consistency.