ABSTRACT
This chapter follows on the development of the phenomenological importance of relationship in experiences of trauma. In this chapter, the emphasis is on the role of the body in our relation to the other. Trauma affects the self as an integrated being. This means exploring how our bodies process and are affected by trauma, how trauma orients us towards the other person and what the ‘foreign’ actually means in its differentiation from the ‘home’ of the same. Here, experiencing the body as a site of home or homelessness, through the philosophy of Lévinasian affect, Ricœurian lament and Merleau-Ponty’s definition of corporeal relatedness, will be brought into conversation with contemporary bodied discourses of trauma, such as Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy. This chapter will look at how phenomenologies of home, as a space of belonging and exile, enable us to account for the often conflicting experiences of relation to the body and place that trauma can bring.
