This chapter begins with an exposition of Husserl’s phenomenology of embodiment, oriented around his fundamental distinction between the body as object and the body as lived. The lived body can only be apprehended as mine through the double-sided experience of touching and being-touched, and its movements are needed for the articulation of a three-dimensional spatiality in which we apprehend fully bounded things both far and near. Its kinaestheses or capacities for skilled movement also underpin the ‘I can’, the awareness of immediately available agency. I show what Merleau-Ponty takes up from Husserl and adapts for his own purposes, and go on to sketch out the influence of Jakob von Uexküll’s ethology and of Heidegger’s account of our being engaged in the world and being ahead of ourselves projectively. Against the backdrop of what Merleau-Ponty calls our intentional arc or fundamental function of projection, I give a preliminary overview of his positive account.

In this contribution, I consider what we call “body” and its role in clinical practices. My chapter draws upon the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan. This allows me to consider not only the body as a materiality structured by its finitude, not only the body as a locus of our lived experiences, not only the body as anchoring our actions, but also the body as it incarnates otherness. Otherness is here understood as twofold: On the one hand, the body as a living organism is a generality and its functioning hosts a germ of depersonalization; on the other hand, and at the same time, the body is that which keeps any other subject away from me, separated from me, irreducible to me. It thus appears that the body is both at once a concretion of alterity and of singularity. On the basis of such a conceptualization of the body, I consider the possibility of designing a clinical practice informed by both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan.