ABSTRACT
Since touch is the basis of all sensory perception, losing our sense of touch would mean losing our sense of being in the world. It would also curtail our emotional life, since touch is connected to a broad range of emotional experience. Both the primacy and the proximity of touch make it seem inimical with deception; it is ‘perhaps the most truthful sense’. A contemporary example in the West of anxiety around touch concerns the touching of children. Touch has an important role in self-identity. Bodywork treatments can involve quite diverse and intense experiences of touch, including the subtle, the painful, the mechanistic and the utterly sensuous. Therapeutic touch, then, transforms both the toucher and the touched. But bodywork extends the idea of the porosity of the body, whereby energy and emotion can cross its boundaries and move back and forth between practitioner and client. Even a face-to-face bodywork encounter is, however, inherently intercorporeal.
