ABSTRACT
Modern medicine can be looked upon as a kind of religion of the body. The medical mission is, then, to purify those actual bodies it meets of all that is deemed foreign or disruptive as measured against that ideal. Violence—at least in its physical aspects—is also an encounter with the body. However, the violent body is quite unlike its modern medical counterpart. The incursion of the potentially violent body into the mental space of the medical hospital is in a way already an act of violence. The non-body viewed in a limited way is much less of an irritant to the conventional medical discourse. The term psychodynamic implies an altogether different approach to the "business as usual" version of contemporary anatomical medicine. An emphasis on attention to social meanings also enables a certain degree of self-reflexiveness, so that a "psychodynamic assessment" is not simply about applying a set of procedures to a given problem.
