Embodied trauma and healing : critical conversations on the concept of health

PART 1: Critical discourses on embodied trauma -- Trauma and the subject -- Trauma, ego and the body -- Labelling traumatic ambiguity -- PART TWO: Phenomenology and the traumatised subject -- The phenomenology of Lévinas -- Ricœur on narrative experiences -- Merleau-Ponty on embodiment -- PART THREE: Living trauma in relationship -- Silence and communicability: speaking truths -- Homelessness and at-homeness: the body as a site of integration -- The intersubjectivity of trauma: politics, rights and decolonisation -- PART FOUR: Living trauma as health -- Individual healing: the subject and her relationships -- Relational healing: the refiguration of a place -- Conclusion.

What if philosophy could solve the psychological puzzle of trauma? Embodied Trauma and Healing argues just that, suggesting that one might be needed in order to understand the other. The book demonstrates how the body-mind problem that haunted Descartes was addressed by phenomenologists, whilst also proposing that the human experience is lived subjectively as embodied consciousness.

Throughout this book, the author suggests that the phenomenological tools that are used to explore the body can also be an effective way to discuss the physical and mental aspects of embodied trauma. Drawing on the work of Paul Ricœur, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Lévinas, the book outlines a phenomenological approach to the embodied and relational subject. It offers a reading of embodied trauma that can connect it to wider conversations in psychological underpinnings of trauma through Peter Levine’s somatic research and Bessel van der Kolk’s embodied remembering. Connecting to the analytic tradition, the book suggests that phenomenology can unify both language-based and body-based therapeutic practice. It also presents a compelling discussion that ties the embodied experience of relation in trauma to the wider causal factors of social suffering and relational rupture, intergenerational trauma and the trauma of land, as informed by phenomenology.

Embodied Trauma and Healing is essential reading for researchers within the fields of philosophy, psychology and medical humanities for it actively engages with contemporary configurations of trauma theory and recent research developments in healing and mental disorder diagnosis.

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