Corporealized and Disembodied Minds: A Phenomenological View of the Body in Melancholia and Schizophrenia

The article starts with a phenomenological account of the implicit functioning of the body in everyday perception and performance, turning the physical body into a living medium of the subject's relation to the world. This transparency of the body is conceptualized as a mediated immediacy, based on the coupling and synthesis of single elements of perception and movement to form the integrated intentional arcs by which we are directed toward the world. However, this mediacy of embodied consciousness is vulnerable to disturbances of the mediating processes involved, leading to different forms of opacity of the body and, subsequently, an alienation of the self from the world. Thus, the body may regain its pure materiality and turn into an obstacle; this is the case in severe depression, which may be described as a reification or corporealization of the lived body. On the other hand, the subject may also be detached from the mediating processes that it normally embodies, resulting in what may be called a disembodied mind; this condition is often found in schizophrenic patients. The loss of the implicit or transparent structure of the body is described in both contrasting cases, with special emphasis on disturbances of embodied intersubjectivity.