What is a body?

Most of us probably feel we have some intuitive grasp of the question. It takes philosophers and psychoanalysts to throw this into doubt. The doubt is often fruitful; but it can make us wonder whether we have bodies, whether we are bodies. What follows is an attempt to rebalance our thinking around the issues - suggesting among other things that our doubts about the body, our sense of alienation from it, themselves reflect a problem of a psychoanalytic nature.

My principle aim in this book is to suggest ways in which we can reassure ourselves, on every level from the primal to the metaphysical (and really the two are closely linked), that we in fact are bodies; that it is with, in and through our bodies that we both feel and think; and that this way of experiencing is profoundly 'psychoanalytic', and in fact restitutive of something important that has gone missing from psychoanalysis.

Published by Rebus Press, December 1998.

Distributed by Karnac Books £14.99

ISBN 1 900877 12 0

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