ABSTRACT
In gestalt and phenomenology authors use the terms the living or lived body. The lived body includes the narrative history of a person's life, embodied in the here and now encounter where, 'the world is not what I think, but what I live through'. Although Husserl, amongst others, had discussed the body Maurice Merleau-Ponty is regarded as the phenomenologist who brought the lived body to phenomenology, this being a body that he saw as being in constant dialogue with the world. The tragedy is that our pre-reflective bodily experience can be relegated to the status of object through cultural ground introjects that elevate thinking above the lived body. Although recent and ongoing discoveries in neuroscience are exciting, Husserl do carry some wariness that such excitement could lead to a dichotomising of brain, body and situation in gestalt and psychotherapy.
