ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how touch is used towards therapeutic' ends in the context of massage in the UK. It focuses on the ways that the interviewees make sense of the action of their touch on the client. Tracing the complex connections between the body, flesh, skin, touch and the emotions has underlined the value in attending to the experiential and felt qualities of therapeutic' forms of touch. The practitioner's accounts of touch reflected the multiple and diverse nature of touch, underlining the need for attention to be paid to the detailed somatic processes or haptic knowledges' that are integral to touch. Serres complicates the distinction commonly made between the interior and exterior of the body and emphasises the connections between the different elements of the body's interiority. In Serresean terms, problems' arise from the past experiences that have been kneaded into the body and, as a result, constitute its present corporeality.
