A Corporeal Self: New Perspectives on the Subject in the Contemporary Phenomenological Debate

Challenging a philosophical background dominated by a strong Cartesian dualism, new phenomenological approaches, reinforced by empirical discoveries, are suggesting the existence of a corporeal sense of self that is necessary for the definition of our identity and for the understanding of others and the world. Drawing upon the contributions of classical phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, I will try to understand the relevance of this corporeal self in several and different areas, such as feminist theories and psychiatry, and I will also underline how we can observe the link between the self and the body in meditation. These remarks will lead to hypothesising therapies based on the strengthening of bodily awareness. In fact, adopting an “embodied approach” enables a full understanding of the complexity of human beings, complexity that emerges in several pathologies. Accordingly, it seems that medical as well as psychiatric approaches, too, should analyse the self as a whole, as an “embodied mind.”