Phenomenology of the body

Thomas Ots

pp. 43-58

in: Beatrix Pfleiderer, Gilles Bibeau (eds), Anthropologies of medicine, Wiesbaden, Vieweg+Teubner, 1991

Abstract

When in 1985 I returned from China and reported that traditional Chinese doctors manage to elicit emotional changes by analyzing the specific cluster of the patient's bodily symptoms (emotion-bodily symptom specificity) this message was met with disbelief by many of the psychosomatically oriented physicians, and vehemently rejected by almost all medical anthropologists I spoke to. This rejection of the Chinese model of psychosomatic specificity, and that of similar models, e.g., between bodily changes and psychodynamic conflicts (Alexander 1948, 1968), or personality traits (Dunbar 1954), was paired with a deep belief that many diseases bear symbolic meaning, thus constructing a very specific, symbolic relation between sociocultural events and the diseased body. This position is best expressed in the work of Geertz (1973).