Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T09:10:09.707Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A short history of bodily sensation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Jean Starobinski
Jean Starobinski*
Affiliation:
Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genéve, Switzerland
*
1Address for correspondence: Dr Jean Starobinski, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Genéve, 3, Place de l' Université, 1211 Genéve 4, Switzerland.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In one of his Cahiers, Paul Valéry has the note. Somatism (heresy of the end of time),

Adoration, cult of the machine for living.† Have we come to the end of time? The heresy anticipated by Valéry has almost become the official religion. Everything is related to the body, as if it had just been rediscovered after being long forgotten; body image, body language, body consciousness, liberation of the body are the passwords. Historians, prey to the same infection, have begun inquiring into what previous cultures have done with the body, in way of tattooing, mutilation, celebration all the rituals related to the various bodily functions.2 Past writers from Rabelais to Flaubert are ransacked for evidence, and immediately it becomes apparent that we are far from being the first discoverers of bodily reality. That reality was the first knowledge to enter human understanding: ‘They knew that they were naked’ (Genesis 3.7). From then on, it has impossible to ignore the body.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , February 1990 , pp. 23 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This article first appeared in Humanities in Review, vol. I, 1982, published by the New York Institute for the Humanities, and translated by Sarah Matthews.

References

Notes

1 Valéry, Paul, Cahiers (Paris: Pléiade, 1973), vol. 1. p. 1126.Google Scholar

2 Cf. Brain, Robert, The Decorated Body (New York: Harper & Row, 1979)Google Scholar; Ebin, Victoria, The Body Decorated (Thames and Hudson, 1979).Google Scholar

3 Cicero, Academica 2.24.

4 Montaigne, , Essais (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), p. 587.Google Scholar

5 Aristotle, De anima 3.2.

6 Descartes, , Traité des passions de I'âme, in Descartes' Philosophical Writings, trans. Smith, Norman Kemp (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 290.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Gusdorf, Georges, Naissance de la conscience romantique au siècle des lumières (Paris, 1976), pp. 285–316.Google Scholar

8 'Coenasthesis, dissertatio […] quam praeside Reil, J. C., pro gradu doctoris defendit Chr. Friedr. Hübner' (Halle, 1974).Google Scholar

9 On the history of the concept of cenesthesia in the nineteenth century, cf. Starobinski, Jean, ‘Le Concept de cénestheśie et les idées neuropsychologiques de Moritz Schiff,’ Genserus 34 (1977), fasc. 1/2. pp. 2–20.Google Scholar

10 Wernicke, Carl, Grundriss der Psychiatrie, 2nd ed. (Leipzig, 1906).Google Scholar

11 Ribot, , The Diseases of the Personality (Chicago, 1891), p. 5.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., pp. 5–6.

13 Ibid., p. 30.

14 Taine, Hippolyte, De I'intelligence, 12th ed. (Paris, 1911), vol. 2. p. 474.Google Scholar

15 Ribot, , Diseases of the Personality, pp. 19–20.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., p. 157.

17 Notably, in Problèmes de psychologie affective (Paris, 1906), p. 26.Google Scholar

18 Janet, Pierre, De I'angoisse à I'extase, 2, vols. (1926; new ed. Paris, 1975), vol. 2, chs. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

19 Janet, , De Iapos;angoisee à Iapos;extase, vol. 2, ch. 2, sec. 8, p. 71.Google Scholar

20 Dupré, Ernest, Pathologie de I'imagination et de I' émotivité (Paris, 1925), pp. 289–304.Google Scholar

21 Blondel, Charles, La conscience morbide (Paris, 1914), p. 264Google Scholar. The quotation refers back to Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Swain, J. W. (London, 1915), p. 271.Google Scholar

22 See, among others, Polhemus, Ted, ed., Social Aspects of the Human Body (London: Penguin, 1978)Google Scholar; Benthall, Jonathan and Polhemus, Ted, eds., The Body as a Medium of Expression (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 1975).Google Scholar

23 Blondel, , La conscience morbide, pp. 259–260.Google Scholar

24 Ribot, , Diseases of the Personality, p. 25.Google Scholar

25 Freud, Sigmund, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Strachey, J. (London, 1955), p. 39.Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 226.

27 Ibid., p. 237.

28 Ibid., p. 236.

29 Freud, Sigmund, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, Strachey, J. (London, 1964), vol. 15. p. 120.Google Scholar

30 Ibid., p.123.

31 Ibid., p 122.

32 Ibid., pp. 122–123.

33 Schilder, Paul, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, Psyche Monographs: No 4 London, Kegan Paul, 1935.Google Scholar

34 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (London: Methuen, 1967), p. 338.Google Scholar

35 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Smith, Colin (London: Routledge, Kegan & Paul, 1962), p. 101.Google Scholar

36 Sennett, Richard, ‘Le narcissisme et la culture moderne,’in Former I'homme, Rencontres Internationales de Genève (Neuchâtel, La Baconnière, 1979), pp. 187–203.Google Scholar