What does 'embodied' mean? We don't want to imply that anyone actually CAN be disembodied. Some people are well embodied in integrated bodies; some people are poorly embodied in disintegrated bodies, but no one can live and not be a body. That's first level. Embodiment ontologically is just the fact that one is a body. No one has a choice about it. Second, there can be a psychological or experiential definition: embodiment as rooting one thoughts or feelings about oneself in the reality of one's body (Anita Silvers). In this sense of it, people can choose - not whether to BE bodies - but whether to give importance to the fact that they are bodies. -from packet correspondence
Her pleasure in these relationships is compromised by her awareness of having sacrificed herself, or pleasure takes on a different meaning, referring to bodily sensations that have become divorced from or a stand-in for the pleasure of being a soul in a body living in connection with others. - Carol Gilligan When we die our bodies go back to nature and become new life. This is one of those truths I didn't want to learn from nature. - Sara Wright
Imagine my surprise,
By trying to control, to shape, my body through the calculated tools and methods of bodybuilding, and time and again, in following these methods, failing to do so, I am able to meet that which cannot be finally controlled and known: the body. In this meeting lies the fascination, if not the purpose, of bodybuilding. To come face to face with chaos, with my own failure or a form of death. -Kathy Acker Cultured bodies 309
You know, of course, that this bodymind thinking/being is so cutting edge that those of us that are struggling to live it and then articulate it are up against mountains of western EVERYTHING and then there is the judeochristian stuff inside and out. - Sara Wright |
..a traumatizing of love that leads the psyche to dissociate itself from the body, which then becomes the repository of experiences that cannot be known or spoken. Carol Gilligan The birth of pleasure, 221
Divided bodies: dissociation, denial, disavowal, somatic therapy, the unconscious
- "I also think that to pitch a program for embodiment
there needs to be a discussion/ notice-talking of what 'DISembodiment'
is, can be, results of." student Corin Gintner
- There does need to be something that highlights a search to understand the wish for disembodiment. I think we understand some of this but it is so crucial a question students should be invited to help discover the reasons and mechanisms.
Note on 'embodied' and 'disembodied'
As usual I want to find a way to avoid implying that there can be such things as thought or feeling without bodies. The embodied/disembodied contrast has meant to mark a contrast within kinds of necessarily embodied thinking. It's a contrast that is central but hard to rename simply. It seems to need a whole long story.
I think what we have been calling disembodied thinking is dissociated thinking, split-off thinking, isolated or segregated thinking, which operates through segregation or isolation of some bodily structure from the rest of the body's responsive possibilities. Traumatized thinking.
So dissociated and integrated might be one way to name the difference, but it seems too technical. Should we compromise with fully embodied? And make the more technical point elsewhere?
I don't think fully embodied thinking is always conscious that it is embodied: it could at some moment be fully felt and fully intelligent perceptual response to something other than the self. The fully felt and fully intelligent is the essence.
-faculty correspondence
This stage of the religious process of purification is the most perplexing and extreme of all. The attempt to magically annihilate suffering and feelings of badness about oneself, the attempt to exterminate defilement and infidelity, eventuates in the necessity to die together with the killing of others, as if the boundary between life and death, self and other, has been completely obliterated and swamped by the total destruction of all materiality. It seems that in the process of projecting the bad parts of the self to the Infidels and the idealized parts of the self to God, nothing is left. The splitting of sublime immateriality and base badness and lechery is complete. The remaining body of the terrorist, has unconsciously stopped existing. The remaining physical body, with its needs and desires, is now superfluous. Like a pencil that is reduced out of existence by becoming increasingly sharpened this body will find its redemption by becoming pure instrument of God's will, eventually by merging with God in a cataclysm of purifying fire. Becoming ashes is the ultimate act of purification and spiritualization: there is no more desire of the flesh to defile one's self image, and the desire for God has been given its most extreme and loving due.
*
I assume that fundamentalism is not just strictness, rigidity, and literal adherence, but is suffused with a libidinal dimension of desire. For the fundamentalist, keeping the laws (1) is the Truth; (2) protects him; (3) gives him a special relationship; (4) "marries' him vertically. Verticalization of difference engenders vertical desire. Vertical desire is the mystical longing for merger with the idealized abjecting Other. On this view, the starkly opposing terms and polarizations with which fundamentalist thinking is suffused come to assume positions of higher and lower on a vertical axis. Since such binary oppositions, as we know (from deconstructionism, feminism, race theory, or colonial theory) always result in inscribing inequality, fundamentalism is not only a psychic mode of separation; it is also a psychic mode of inequality.11 Within this mode the non-believer is profoundly unequal to the believer, man is eternally unequal to God, and woman is unquestionably unequal to man. Fundamentalism is about inequality. When we think about fundamentalism, we tend to be aware of woman's inequality to man and the non-believer's inequality to the believer, but we tend to forget the believer's inequality to God.12 In fundamentalist regimes, God rules over men, while men rule over women. Being oppressed by God, oppressing women, fundamentalism is an oppressed oppression. Although so persistently present as to be invisible, so totallistically embraced as to be sacralized, this inequality generates a desire aimed at overcoming both the distinctions and the verticality. The striving to overcome verticality through mystical reunion and kill what stands as barrier to this trajectory can generate deep faith and powerful hope (cf. Stein, 2003).
Since certainty and fundamentalistic knowledge are linked to a desire that springs from the 'verticalization of difference': difference becomes scaled and graded perpendicularly. Whereas heterogeneity spreads and sprawls 'horizontally', encompassing different kinds and species, difference in the fundamentalist order is well-marked and sharply-circumscribed. In this vertical mode, there are purified, triumphant, superior believers, and puny, defiled, noxious nonbelievers. The exorbitant, absolute distance between the two, the extreme of exaltation and degradation, mark this verticality. It is the distance between self-loathing and adoration. Rather than the rebellious son fearing his castration by the father, it is the abjection to a lethal ideal, a regression to the archaic phallic father that is at stake, for
"whereas the ego submits to the superego out of fear of punishment, it submits to the ego-ideal out of love" (Freud, 1921; Nunberg, 1932).
*
I believe that even after having exposed this cultural construct for what it is, its wellsprings originate in some deeply human psychodynamics. I have (cf. Stein, 2002a) written that the terrorist wants (unconsciously) to change the father from persecutor into an idealized love object, to reverse the rage and discontent (and the pain and the suffering) into glory and narcissistic enhancement. When I use the term 'regression to the father' to explain terrorist behavior and experience, I mean regression from the persecutory to the idealized father. The persecutory residues, however, remain.
*
The attempt to magically annihilate suffering and feelings of badness about oneself, the attempt to exterminate defilement and infidelity, eventuates in the necessity to die together with the killing of others, as if the boundary between life and death, self and other, has been completely obliterated and swamped by the total destruction of all materiality. It seems that in the process of projecting the bad parts of the self to the Infidels and the idealized parts of the self to God, nothing is left. The splitting of sublime immateriality and base badness and lechery is complete. The remaining body of the terrorist, has unconsciously stopped existing. The remaining physical body, with its needs and desires, is now superfluous. Like a pencil that is reduced out of existence by becoming increasingly sharpened this body will find its redemption by becoming pure instrument of God's will, eventually by merging with God in a cataclysm of purifying fire. Becoming ashes is the ultimate act of purification and spiritualization: there is no more desire of the flesh to defile one's self image, and the desire for God has been given its most extreme and loving due.
- Ruth Stein
- Ruth Stein is a New York psychoanalyist. These are extracts from a paper called "Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire". (Harpers, May 2005, has a number of stories on American religious fundamentalism. There are pictures with one of the stories - copies of contemporary religious paintings - that support Stein's theory interestingly.)
The thing that's becoming clearer to me that doesn't seem spelled out enough is the need for further understanding of the bodily integration piece. That's what I'm trying to sort through in my thesis.
The difference in my mind and my body when I hear the words "sentient awareness" and "mind-body-spirit" is vast. The words sentient awareness fill me with animal-earth connection - it vibrates my whole being, it tuning-forks me. The mind-body-spirit world-weary words only stick in my head as a concept to be understood at the clinical mental level.
I think it was Foucault who talks about how this overused phenomenon of "self-discovery" can actually work to our detriment as it doesn't take us far enough in understanding true embodiment and full integration of the physical body. That's where I got stuck and lost in my recovery work until I started working with my current therapist who is definitely definitely understands embodiment and is teaching me. Words and concepts she has given me to get back into my body are words such as grace and compassion. They initially struck a chord that made me crazy - I didn't want to be kind or compassionate to my body - that was the last thing I understood. The self-loathing was dripping off of me. They enraged me. They sounded like religious terms. But she slowly helped me understand this way of living versus my fight and flight and limelight world. These words need to be understood at the whole embodiment level - especially for those who have trauma issues or are working with trauma clients.
So I guess what I'm saying is that in this new study description, there might need to be room for a larger component of trauma, addiction, etc. understanding on how it impacts one's ability to grasp embodiment and then to understand how to utilize the tools needed to reconnect not only with self but how to go that next large step and connect fully with the life of the physical body. Has this already been said and I'm missing it? Does this make sense yet - I'm still stumbling through this.
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You absolutely may use my writing for your divided bodies page. The more I bring my issues to the page, the clearer shape they begin to take in my sphere.
[About bi-polar] You talk about it as an issue of vitality - I like that reframing and it will help me now to think of it in those terms. But in the past it's been more of a deliberate choice to keep my craziness nearby in case I needed it as an excuse to bail out of responsibility to myself. I could throw in the towel and blame it on my family genes, etc. The problem with embodiment work/learning is similar to 12-step work - once you're sober and see your part in the addiction/relapse process through 12-Step work/learning, it's hard to go back to the old self-defeating ways and pick up a drink again.
I see the same thing happening as I become more and more open to embodiment and energy work as it pertains to mental illness. It becomes a more deliberate, conscious choice to be crazy - to keep that backdoor escape route from reality open. I feel I'm approaching a line just like I did with my alcoholism - the stronger I claim the disease through writing, the more manageable it becomes; the easier it is to say "no" to the urges to feed into the mania or the depression and the fear surrounding the disease deflates like a balloon.
- student JA