ABSTRACT
To understand the concept of ‘lived experience’ and the ‘lived body’, it is first necessary to define the meaning of phenomenology. This will be my starting point in this chapter, which will be followed by a brief outline of the work of the theorists Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in their understanding of experience and consciousness. The ideas of these phenomenological theorists basically opposed a philosophical and religious tradition that considered the body as inferior to the disembodied soul, mind and consciousness (as espoused by Descartes and often referred to as the ‘mind/body split’). In contrast, Merleau-Ponty for example, positions the sensory and experiencing body ‘before’ the reflective consciousness. The action of thinking, itself, relates to the whole body. I shall state Freud’s place in this tradition in his obvious dedication throughout his work to explore the correlations between the mind and the body. I will provide a further discussion of Freud’s insights into the body and mental illness in Chapter 5.
