Embodiment and Chronic Pain: Implications for Rehabilitation Practice

Throughout the Western world people turn towards the health care system seeking help for a variety of psychosomatic/psychosocial health problems. They become „patients“ and find themselves within a system of practises that conceptualizes their bodies as „objective“ bodies, treats their ill health in terms of the malfunctioning machine, and compartmentalizes their lived experiences into medically interpreted symptoms and signs of underlying biological dysfunction. The aim of this article is to present an alternative way of describing ill health and rehabilitation using the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to deepen our understanding of the rehabilitation process. I will explore how the experience of chronic pain ruptures the natural connection between body and world and how the rehabilitation process can be understood as the re-insertion of the body into the flow of experience, where the body „disappears“ into its natural silence in order to allow the world to once again unfold.

Quelle: SpringerLink – Zeitschriftenbeitrag

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