ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with the premise that human troubles can be usefully traced to two basic, interrelated human challenges: (1) our capacity for thinking what is not necessarily real and (2) our incapacity for bodily affect and responsiveness to living. Complicating that picture, the author proposes the concept of the “shared bodymind” to describe how our minds and bodies are deeply interconnected with and affected by the living processes of the other humans around us, leading at times to collective action in which human groups function as organisms in their own right, toward both productive and problematic ends.
