Phenomenology of the Body The Subject-Object Problem in Psychosomatic Medicine and the Role of Traditional Medical Systems herein

Preface 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). In this symbolic mode of thought the body makes sense only as a culturally inscribed body, but not in itself, as a 'body sui generis', the 'lived-body' (Straus 1963; Leder 1984, 1990). This notion rests on the long-standing premise that the mind is superior to the body, as culture is superior to nature; or in other words, the human mind, and the world of culture are superior to any other organization of life. In modern scientific discourse this relation is expressed by the common assumption that body/nature - as opposed to mind/culture - cannot express intentions. This dichotomy reveals a specific subject-object relation: as the subject defines the object, the mind inscribes the body by giving meaning to the intentionless body; bodily symptoms are interpreted as symbolic utterances of the world of the mind (psyche), thus bodily symptoms are viewed as specific only in relation to their symbolic (cultural) meaning. I argue that in the scientific discourse of psychosomatic medicine, we do not try to understand bodily symptoms as what they present, but as what they represent. Thus, if we cannot detect symbolic or metaphorical meaning in bodily symptoms, in other words, if these symptoms make 'no sense' culturally, we declare them to be