Drawing on Merleau-Ponty offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences. Maurice... more
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work draws our attention to how the body is always our way of having a world and never merely a thing in the world. Our conception of the body must take account of our cultures, our historically located sciences, and our interpersonal relations and cannot reduce the body to a biological given. Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty takes up Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to explore the ideas of normality, abnormality, and pathology. Focusing on the lived experiences of various styles of embodiment, the book challenges our usual conceptions of normality and abnormality and shows how seemingly objective scientific research, such as the study of pathological symptoms, is inadequate to the phenomena it purports to comprehend. The book offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences.
"This volume is a significant contribution to the field of Merleau-Ponty studies, clarifying and critically engaging with crucial ideas at play throughout a wide array of scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. It will also serve to bring Merleau-Ponty's work to greater attention in the fields of medical humanities and disability studies, in ways that will shine new light on both the limitations and possibilities of Merleau-Ponty's thought for helping us to make sense of the great variation in human embodiment and psychology." — Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work draws our attention to how the body is always our way of having a world and never merely a thing in the world. Our conception of the body must take account of our cultures, our historically located sciences, and our interpersonal relations and cannot reduce the body to a biological given. Normality, Abnormality, and Pathology in Merleau-Ponty takes up Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body to explore the ideas of normality, abnormality, and pathology. Focusing on the lived experiences of various styles of embodiment, the book challenges our usual conceptions of normality and abnormality and shows how seemingly objective scientific research, such as the study of pathological symptoms, is inadequate to the phenomena it purports to comprehend. The book offers new insights into our understandings of health and illness, ability and disability, and the scientific and cultural practices that both enable and limit our capacity for diverse experiences.
"This volume is a significant contribution to the field of Merleau-Ponty studies, clarifying and critically engaging with crucial ideas at play throughout a wide array of scholarship on Merleau-Ponty. It will also serve to bring Merleau-Ponty's work to greater attention in the fields of medical humanities and disability studies, in ways that will shine new light on both the limitations and possibilities of Merleau-Ponty's thought for helping us to make sense of the great variation in human embodiment and psychology." — Laura McMahon, Eastern Michigan University
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Demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience. Drawing on the original phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, and John... more
Demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience.
Drawing on the original phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, and John Russon, as well as recent research in child psychology, The Other in Perception argues for perception’s inherently existential significance: we always perceive a world and not just objective facts. The world is the rich domain of our personal and interpersonal lives, and central to this world is the role of other people. We are “paired” with others such that our perception is really the enactment of a coinhabiting of a shared world. These relations with others shape the very way in which we perceive our world. Susan Bredlau explores two uniquely formative domains in which our pairing relations with others are particularly critical: childhood development and sexuality. It is through formative childhood experience that the essential, background structures of our world are instituted, which has important consequences for our developed perceptual life. Sexuality is an analogous domain of formative intersubjective experience. Taken as a whole, Bredlau demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience.
Drawing on the original phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, and John Russon, as well as recent research in child psychology, The Other in Perception argues for perception’s inherently existential significance: we always perceive a world and not just objective facts. The world is the rich domain of our personal and interpersonal lives, and central to this world is the role of other people. We are “paired” with others such that our perception is really the enactment of a coinhabiting of a shared world. These relations with others shape the very way in which we perceive our world. Susan Bredlau explores two uniquely formative domains in which our pairing relations with others are particularly critical: childhood development and sexuality. It is through formative childhood experience that the essential, background structures of our world are instituted, which has important consequences for our developed perceptual life. Sexuality is an analogous domain of formative intersubjective experience. Taken as a whole, Bredlau demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience.
Research Interests:
Drawing on John Dewey’s discussion of habit in Human Nature and Conduct and Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the “adventurer” in The Ethics of Ambiguity, I argue that while some of our relations with things and people may very well be... more
Drawing on John Dewey’s discussion of habit in Human Nature and Conduct and Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion of the “adventurer” in The Ethics of Ambiguity, I argue that while some of our relations with things and people may very well be instru- mental, many take a different form in which it is our very setting, and not merely our attainment, of ends that is at stake. Moreover, the fullest realization of our freedom requires us to recognize not only that this different form of relation, which is cooperative rather than controlling, exists but also that it is constitutive of, rather than in opposition to, our freedom. I conclude by briefly examining how our honest acknowledgment of a kind of powerlessness inherent to our powers, to our freedom, might change the way we interact with other things and other people.
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Plato’s Charmides, I argue, is a remarkably productive text for confronting and questioning some common presuppositions about the body and illness, particularly when we take seriously Socrates’ claim that healing Charmides’ headaches... more
Plato’s Charmides, I argue, is a remarkably productive text for confronting and questioning some common presuppositions about the body and illness, particularly when we take seriously Socrates’ claim that healing Charmides’ headaches requires first examining—and perhaps healing—his soul. I begin by turning to the work of the psychiatrist and medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman to argue that even if the pain Charmides experiences is more ‘physical’than ‘mental’, a physical exam and physical intervention alone will not necessarily be effective in treating his headaches. Next, I turn to the work of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his discussion of the phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ to argue that the body, rather than simply being a physical object is, instead, primarily an experiencing subject; the body is fundamentally our way of having a world. Furthermore, illness, rather than being conceived of as either a physical or mental disorder, should instead be understood in terms of a person’s being-in-the-world with others. Finally, I return to Plato’s Charmides and argue that, just as the phantom limb reflects the destruction of a specific way of being-in-the-world with others, Charmides’ headaches reflect the construction of a specific way of being-in-the-world with others.
This article has been accepted for publication in Medical Humanities, 2018 following peer review, and the Version of Record can be accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011572
© Susan Bredlau
This article has been accepted for publication in Medical Humanities, 2018 following peer review, and the Version of Record can be accessed online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011572
© Susan Bredlau
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Our perception of the world and our relationships with other people are not, I argue, distinct activities. Focusing, first, on Merleau-Ponty's description in the Phenomenology of Perception of his playful interaction with an infant, and,... more
Our perception of the world and our relationships with other people are not, I argue, distinct activities. Focusing, first, on Merleau-Ponty's description in the Phenomenology of Perception of his playful interaction with an infant, and, second, on contemporary research on the phenomena referred to as neonate imitation, joint attention, and mutual gaze, I argue that perception can be a collaborative endeavor. Moreover, this collaborative endeavor, which is definitive of both infant and adult perception, entails trust; our trust in others is not simply a feeling that we perceive but also a way of perceiving. As infants, our trust in others is our perception of the world we share with our caregivers as the world we will also share with others; it is our perception of the world we share with our caregivers as real. As adults, we live our trust in others by perceiving the objects that surround us in ways that protect, rather than damage, the shared worlds that we create in our relationships with them.
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In this chapter, I argue that both Frantz Fanon, in his analysis of changes to the Algerian practice of women wearing the veil prior to and during the Algerian War of Independence, and Raymond Austin, Tom Tso, and Robert Yazzie, in their... more
In this chapter, I argue that both Frantz Fanon, in his analysis of changes to the Algerian practice of women wearing the veil prior to and during the Algerian War of Independence, and Raymond Austin, Tom Tso, and Robert Yazzie, in their implementation and analysis of changes to the Navajo National Judicial System, offer evidence for the phenome- non of autoimmunity described by Derrida. Moreover Fanon, as well as Austin, Tso, and Yazzie, document the lasting toll that foreign occupa- tions—France’s occupation of Algeria and the United States’ occupation
Autoimmunity and Occupation
of Navajo territory, respectively—have had on these communities. This toll includes making it more difficult for these communities to live the phenomenon of autoimmunity in ways that, by being deliberately accept- ing of change, are potentially more constructive than ways that do not deliberately accept change. Nonetheless, Fanon, Austin, Tso, and Yazzie also document that, despite these difficulties, these communities do deliber- ately accept change and work to have foreign influence be constructive ra- ther than destructive.
Autoimmunity and Occupation
of Navajo territory, respectively—have had on these communities. This toll includes making it more difficult for these communities to live the phenomenon of autoimmunity in ways that, by being deliberately accept- ing of change, are potentially more constructive than ways that do not deliberately accept change. Nonetheless, Fanon, Austin, Tso, and Yazzie also document that, despite these difficulties, these communities do deliber- ately accept change and work to have foreign influence be constructive ra- ther than destructive.