Literaturhinweise und Abstracts zum Heftthema aus Psycoterapia e Scienze Umane

Abstract

The biomedical paradigm, in which psychosomatics is embedded, is based on a mind-body dichotomy and on a universalistic and a historical conception of body. Psychosomatics indeed presents an «aseptic» and decontextualized vision in witch illness and body are deprived of any symbolic, social and political value. The perspective of medical anthropology allows for a new paradigm and a critical reading of clinical phenomenology in a non-dualistic key, where the concept of «somatization» is substituted by the concept of «embodiment». In this view, the body ceases to be a mere inscription of symbolic contents, and becomes the place where economy, power and inequality show their embodied effects.