Aspects of the sexual incarnation. an inquiry concerning the meaning of the body in the sexual encounter

Johannes Linschoten

pp. 149-194

in: Joseph Kockelmans (ed), Phenomenological psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

"Among all experienceable things our body is the most our own,"² but - amazingly enough - the body has been overlooked by psychology for many years. To be certain it has been spoken of: but merely as res extensa, as an apparatus or mechanism, a status it owes to Descartes. However, the body which thus was conceived of and maintained as a "preparation", that is as a thing neither alive nor dead, has been assigned a new importance by anthropology in the past few decades, and has now begun to regain its place in psychology, too, as that with which man lives and in which he lives. The body as means of eksistence has become a central theme. In Husserl, however, it is still left out of consideration when taken in this function: phenomenology started with the rediscovery and unfolding of the Cogito and therefore continued to consider the body as merely an object of intentional acts: thus the body in its facticity. And in Heidegger, too, who shifted phenomenology's center of gravity from transcendental consciousness to being-in-the-world, the body is not mentioned; in Being and Time fewer than 10 lines are devoted to the body.³ Interest in the body, thus, did not originate in phenomenology, but in the philosophy of life, in Maine de Biran and in Bergson. It was precisely the contact between these two currents which made the problematic of the body a fertile field for contemporary psychology. On the scene of recent French thought the crop has been harvested by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. But this does not mean that the chapter on "Bodilihood" is complete.

Cited authors

Merleau-Ponty Maurice

Husserl Edmund

Heidegger Martin

Sartre Jean-Paul