Healing our dissociation from body and nature: Gestalt, Levinas, and earth’s ethical call

Abstract

"Abstract: We human animals have always lived in intimate rapport with the rest of nature, until recently that is. Alas, now, a crisis of consciousness and culture is creating a rupture in this essential relationship, thereby impoverishing humankind and the natural world together. Especially disturbing is an escalating tendency to live as if separated from our body and from nature. The present article explicates these reciprocal forms of dissociation (with the help of Paul Goodman’s notion of ‘egoism’), and considers how an embodied relational Gestalt approach can help heal these dreadful splits. When we are more sensitively attuned to our own bodies, we become more compassionately responsive to the bodies of others, human and otherwise. Correlatively, when we welcome direct contact with the beings and presences of nature, our bodies are awakened and enlivened and our well-being is enhanced. Guided by Emmanuel Levinas’ startling phenomenological philosophy, the article explores an especially salient (but often unnoticed) phenomenon in our direct encounters with nature: namely, a distinctive ethical summons to responsibility that our vulnerable body(self) feels prior to any free choice or consent. Events from daily life and from psychotherapy are pondered by way of Goodman’s and Levinas’ views. Key words: compassion, culture, ecological, ecopsychology, embodiment, other, phenomen- ology, psychotherapy, responsibility, self."