Volatile Bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism (Elizabeth Grosz, 1994)

3. Body Images: Neurophysiology (神經生理學) and Corporeal (肉體的) Mappings (P.62-86)

The Body Image

• P.62-63 This soul-like double inhabited and animated the material body but was logically distinct from it. It left the body at the point of death.


• P.63 While the ancients provided philosophical, religious, and ritualized contexts for the medically oriented views, probably the earliest technical references to the body image occur in the writings of the renowned sixteenth-century physician and surgeon Ambroise Pare......Pare's work was primarily developed in the field of war injuries, which gave him a great deal of experience with amputations (截肢). It was from this knowledge that he write the first descriptions of the phantom limb. He explained that experience of the phantom limb after 'mortification' as being produced by the continuity and 'consentiment' of the dead parts with the living ones. As an example of the phantom sensation, he suggested an analogy (相似) with the feeling of being pulled by the shirt, where the body is being acted upon, and acts, with reference to an absent or intangible force.


• In his [Descartes] Principles, he used the painful sensations of the phantom hand as proof that only the soul experiences what is in the brain. He acknowledged the importance of peripheral stimulation, and in The Passions of the Soul he claimed that the mind is connected to the whole of body and not simply to the brain.


• P.65 ....many have argued about the functional and anatomical differences between male and female brains. It has been argued - and this is a trend still observable today - that women's brains, like children's, are less localized, more fluid and plastic, with functions dispersed more widely through the cortex.......women are less likely to lose speech after a stroke or cerebral lesion. The assumption is that the speech functions or centers in women are not so discretely localized and thus are less vulnerable to attack.

Schilder and the Body Image

• P.67 Schilder's conception of the body image relies much more strongly on psychology than it does on neurophysiology.
• P.68 The image of the human body means the picture of our own body which we form in our mind, that is to say, the way in which the body appears to ourselves. There are sensations given to us. We see parts of the body-surface. We have tactile, thermal, pain impressions. (Schilder 1978:II)

The Phantom Limb

• P.71 The phantom moves spontaneously in accordance with the movements of the rest of the body and it sometimes amenable to voluntary movement. Indeed, this seems to be a prerequisite (必要條件) for the amputee's ability to use prosthetic (義肢的) replacements, artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb, even if only for functional purposes.
• The phantom limb changes quite dramatically over time. The closer in time to the amputation, the more realistic is its appearance and (usually but not always) the more painful are the sensations coming from it; the greater the passage of time since the amputation, the more distorted and phantomlike the sensations become.
• P.73 The phantom is an expression of nostalgia (懷舊之情) for the unity and wholeness of the body, its completion. It is a memorial to the missing limb, a psychical delegate that stands in its place. There is thus not only a physical but also a psychical wound and scar in the amputation or surgical intervention into any part of the body. The phantom limb is the narcissistic (自我陶醉的) reassertion of the limb's presence in the face of its manifest biological loss, an attempt to preserve the subject's narcissistic sense of bodily wholeness.
  

• P.75 Like Freud, Schilder emphasizes the crucial role played not only by the child's own corporeal sensations but also by the activities of those who tend and care for the child during its earliest years. Freud discusses the essentially seductive (有魅力的) role played by the mother's care for the child and the child's reliance on her support for survival (Freud 1905c). This necessary dependence implies that the child's body and its bodily experiences are not simply the product of its own endogenous sensations and its various experiments with its bodily capacities; the child's body, particularly as an already sexually designated body onto which a culture's fantasies of sexual difference are etched, is like a screen onto which a mother's - and culture's - desires, wishes, fears, and hopes are projected and internalized.
• P.76 Depersonalization is a much more severe psychical transformation of the body image. Schilder is credited with providing depersonalization with its now commonly recognized role of mediating (調停解決) between notions of self and the external world.
• P.76-77 In depersonalization, subjects lose interest in the whole body. They refuse or are afraid to invest any narcissistic libido in the body image. They may feel a dramatic change in self-conception and in relations to the external world.
  
• P.77 Depersonalization may in fact account for the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences. The body, or its various parts, is set at a distance from the subject. The greater the libidinal (本能的) investment in the organ or bodily zone before depersonalization, the more alienated the subject feels from that zone in the various manifestations (表現) of the disorder.
• In hypochondria (憂鬱症), there is a displacement or transposition of libido from one organ to another; this also occurs in the case of hysteria (情緒爆發), but added to it is the primary process of condensation. The intensity of one zone is displaced onto another bodily zone; but the meaning and value of a zone, or more than one, are also transferred to another bodily zone.
  
• P.78 hypochondria, depersonalization, and hysteria indicate the overlap and the interchange between the organic and the psychical bodies through the mediation of the body image.

Social Extensions of the Body

• P.80 ...subjects do not walk the same way or have the same posture when they are naked as when they wear clothing.
  
• The body image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself. When we take a stick in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become part of the body-image. In order to get the full sensation at the end of the stick, the stick must be in a more or less rigid connection with the body. It then becomes part of the bony system of the body, and we may suppose that the rigidity of the bony system in an important part in every body-image. (Schilder 1978:202)
• Part of the difficulty of learning how to use these implements and instruments is not simply the technical problem of how they are used but also the libidinal problem of how they become psychically invested.
• P.83 The body image determines both the localization of sensations in different concrete regions of the body and the position of the body as a whole within space, the relative positions of two simultaneous stimuli and the differences between movements on the surface of the skin and the movements of limbs.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Theories of Representation and Difference). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.