ABSTRACT
Beginning with Georges Canguilhem the ontological-epistemological dichotomy starts to change. In fact, although he agreed with the Positivists concerning the usefulness of the pathophysiological analysis of the corpse, he shed light on a new and completely different dimension: lived experience. The emphasis on the experiential aspects of pain put the author much closer to the phenomenological way of thinking: Canguilhem himself recognizes his debt to Merleau-Ponty in the text The Normal and the Pathological. On a theoretical level, the body of the patient starts to be intended as a “bio-psycho-social whole”, and consequently, according to our thesis for which the ontological definition of body defines the epistemological paradigm of reference, the clinical approach begins to study the body in a gestaltic and holistic manner. The vision of the body of the patient changes from a body as object of medical therapy and becomes a body-subject of the clinical relationship.
