Biopolitics, psychosomatics, participating bodies

Docile bodies: transnational research ethics as biopolitics.

This essay explores the claim that bioethics has become a mode of biopolitics. It seeks to illuminate one of the myriad of ways that bioethics joins other institutionalized discursive practices in the task of producing, organizing, and managing the bodies-of policing and controlling populations-in order to empower larger institutional agents. The focus of this analysis is the contemporary pract...

Psychosomatics

Psychosomatics

The book opens with brief chapters on theories and definitions, and on the physiology of the emotions. Then follow chapters on the respiratory system, the gut, cardio-vascular system, the skin, endocrines and metabolism, and rheumatism. In the last chapter the author examines some of the many problems which remain to be solved, one of the most important being the limitations of personality stud...

[Phenomenology and psychosomatics].

By dividing the field of the human, the psyche-soma dualism ended in sectorizing diseases into organic illnesses, and psychic illnesses. Eventually, however, the so-called 'psychosomatic disorders' that, apparently, had broken up such a pattern have been converted to a new corpus pineale just as Descartes would have done. The body is reduced to a mere instrument of psyche, and the subject is re...

Cartesian dualism and psychosomatics.

Ajarring surprise greets the reader of 20th century psychosomatic literature who comes to it after having been immersed in 17th and 18th century materials. The mind-body dualism credited to Descartes is referred to with uncommon frequency and is usually said to have exercised an overwhelmingly negative influence on modem medicine. Roy R. Grinker, for example, bitterly blames Cartesian dualism f...