ABSTRACT
The conventional wisdom in body psychotherapy is that the first of these three categories, the body as something we have, is an expression of Cartesian alienation—part of the problem for which our work tries to be a solution. This denial of embodiment and exclusive identification with mentality, so common in the mainstream of Western society, has been rightly highlighted by body psychotherapists and many others. Social theory of the body has recently started to move on from a cataloguing of the many varieties of alienation from and disciplining of bodies, to tentative accounts of empowerment and self-creation through the production of embodiment. The chapter argues that sociology has been taught by feminism and other human rights movements "to regard the body as highly relevant to any theorisation of socially situated subjectivity, and simultaneously to problematise any notion that 'the body' can be thought of as a single and coherent conceptual entity".
