THE BODY, THIS UNKNOWN
Adriana Tanese Nogueira
Psychoanalyst | Instituto AELLA
adrianatsn@icloud.com
We speak of “my body,” “your body,” “me and my body,” implicitly suggesting that “we” are something other than “our” body. Its transformations, changes, and experiences are largely unknown to us; we struggle to understand them and are quickly frightened by them.
Once we created the psyche as a separate and autonomous entity from the body, the latter was reduced to the anatomical body known to medicine. And since the psyche was brought closer to the soul, to thoughts and ideas — that is, to truth — the body was left with the uncomfortable role of evil, deceit, mask, falsehood. Plato spoke of the “madness of the body,” the Bible of the “curse of the flesh,” Descartes conceived the body as inanimate and insensible, an object to be anatomized, and the market transformed it into “labor power.”
In this context, it seems reasonable to shape the body, to sculpt it surgically as if it were imperfect clay that the “science of man” must refine — just as obstetrics, in the name of progress, improves natural childbirth through surgical birth.
Our relationship with the body reflects the relationship we have established with nature, presented as a mission in the biblical Genesis: we are called to dominate it. Embedded in the word “dominate” is the burden of fear, threat, danger, and distrust that characterizes the Western view of nature. What is perceived as dangerous must be dominated. This is a relationship of force, a tug of war in which we cast ourselves as small gods, whose great achievements conceal the great disasters and insanities committed to this day.
For our own survival and for a life of quality, we must learn to befriend the earth, the body, and its languages. We must learn new ways of seeing and develop a positive, trusting, and enriching relationship with the totality that we are.
Women undergo multiple bodily transformations throughout their lives — moments in which the voice of the body becomes stronger and more insistent. Yet they often do not know how to deal with these passages. In Western society, the rites and symbols capable of representing and giving meaning to these transformations have been lost.
Men, who seemingly do not experience changes as physically evident, also seek to escape the mental cage in which they have enclosed themselves — and been enclosed — in order to rediscover a more whole and satisfying identity.
The body, as a source of meaning, as a challenge to the reductionist logics of science, as a wealth of experiences and an opening toward a new human identity in a new cosmos, is the provocation we offer in an attempt to overcome the rupture that separated mind and body, spirit and matter, soul and flesh.
