Review of The body and psychology.

Abstract

HENDERIKUS J. STAM (ED.) The Body and Psychology Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1998, 250 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5534-8, US$ 25.95, Softcover) Reviewed by DARRYL HILL A book on of body? What could muscles, skin, and bones have to do with psychology? How can stuff of be implicated in psyche? These are questions heart of this original exploration of psychological body. The answers that emerge are innovative and speculative beginning for a of body, as talk of permeates other disciplines. All articles in this collection were previously published in journal Theory & Psychology. The book, however, has expanded introduction by editor Henderikus Stam, which provides a necessary and valuable background. Stam contends that psychology has not taken body seriously in most of its current manifestations (p. 6). Therefore, chapters focus on alternative conceptions of embodiment. Appropriately, goal of collection is an invitation to reconstrue as a discipline of bodies (p. 1), while simultaneously challenging notion of disciplinary investigations into body, since very nature of body resists neat partitioning into disciplines. The first of three main sections seeks to integrate and psychological perspectives on bodies. Each of these chapters is critical of social construction of body. Alan Radley uses theory of Simmel, phenomenology of Merleau-- Ponty, and symbolic interactionism of Goffman to argue that display conditions and possibilities for worlds. Relying on many rich examples drawn from everyday life, Radley finds embodiment (the ways are deployed in relations) to be a basic condition of human existence (p. 28), and therefore a crucial phenomenon for psychologists. Sampson contends that constructionism has failed to take seriously notion of embodiment. He criticizes Judith Butler, a popular gender theorist, for being more concerned with a third-person body and discursive nature of body. He is equally dissatisfied with phenomenological approaches, which examine lived flesh of body, but fail to understand embodiment as a basis for knowledge and practice. Ultimately, Edward Sampson calls for a politics of embodiment, ways in which are site of oppression. Harry Kempen is similarly dissatisfied with cultural studies on self because they have mistakenly overemphasized variability in body. The key to his project is to understand subjectifying body or embodied selfing process (p. 65), aspects of self that are at same time universal and variable (p. 58). He proposes we look embodied self, a corps-sujet (p. 59). In other words, central issue how selves are constrained by bodily activities and a biologically embodied self. The middle section of book shares a concern for ways in which are sexed and gendered. These chapters collectively show how body's sex and gender are implicated in regimes of knowledge and disciplinarity. Elizabeth Wilson examines discourse on computer and cognitive science for clues about kind of body presumed by these approaches. Her critical analysis of writings on Turing test and Atkinson and Shiffrin's now classic, but outdated, model of memory leads to Derrida's notion of trace and Irigaray's feminist analysis of knowledge. In end, she inscribes gender onto seemingly disembodied thinker heart of cognitive and computer science. Betty Bayer and Kareen Malone circumscribe feminist discourses on women's embodied subjectivity. While they agree that body is often central to questions of knowledge, and key to questions about control and normality in women's lives, through a Lacanian slight of hand, they conclude that the body is never as univocal as and western epistemologies recapitulates would have it (p. …