Emotion and Embodiment within the Medical World

Abstract

The medical world with its extended chains of instrumental appropriation of the body is perhaps the site in our postmodern world that seems most oppressive to letting the emotions have their voice and sway over the course of our lives. This had seemed true even without the growing managerial cost-accounting that has also come to transform medicine into a further reifying practice. Yet, paradoxically, most medical practice is located between the most routine kind of maintenance and the acute reaction to trauma, i.e. situations that involve a longer term coping with crises and chronic medical conditions that are obvious openings where authentic revelation through the power of emotion is legitimized. Medicine works at the boundaries of many of the most culturally charged terms of identity and meaning, intervening in regions that dramatically change our sense of who we are and what our life is about. Yet it does so blindly and awkwardly, because it intervenes in areas in which the emotional dimensions are central to these identities and meanings without an ontology that allows it fully to comprehend this. Insofar as regaining health entails regaining an emotionally capacious understanding and relationship to changes in embodiment, the biomedical model of body is unable to facilitate full healing.