THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

...........................by Stanley

......In western depth psychology there is an aspect of what we call ‘the self’ that has been missed; it is an omission that runs through the whole gamut of psychoanalysis from Freud to Jung and Hillman. What we’ve missed in our psychology is the physical body – the body as essentially me.
.....We must be very clear what we are saying here. The body stands at the threshold of both the subjective and the objective worlds. Firstly, the body is an objective thing in the world. We can look at it from the outside and examine it just as we can any living organism. It can be studied scientifically and medically. I can have this objective view of my own body, just as I can with anyone else’s.
......When we refer to the physical body there is a lurking ambiguity. We usually mean heart, blood circulation, brain, nervous system, etc etc. The difficulty arises when we imply by this that our subjectivity, our mind, our soul, is not physical. This lands us in a dilemma because it artificially splits our actual experience. Arthur Koestler called it the illusion of the ghost in the machine.
......But the body is not just a machine that I inhabit; it is also my subjective experience of myself. This is the experience of the body as me, the foundation of myself as a subject; and this subjectivity is mine alone. No one else can experience it directly but myself. It cannot be examined medically or scientifically because it is not an object – it is a subject, the sense of myself.
......There are all kinds of arguments, religious and cultural, that might persuade us that there is a difference between the body on the one hand and the soul or mind. But putting these arguments aside, and going on how I actually find myself from moment to moment, there is no question that I experience myself subjectively as a physical being. It is part of my essential nature that I am located in physical space and time and that I experience seeing, hearing, feeling, touching, loving and hating as a physical being.
.....If one imagines oneself as a ghost without a body it is impossible to conceive, for example, that one would have any emotions, because emotions are both subjective and physical. Both. We only experience our emotions through our physicality. Deaden the body with drugs or anaesthesia and there are no emotions.
......But we have a cultural prejudice against thinking this way. It seems to offend our preconceived notions of the soul or mind. But there is no reason we cannot say that the ‘soul’ is just another name for our embodied experience. Certainly there is the body, but there is also the body of me. There is no way we can get away with a philosophy that does without either – the body as an object and as a subject.
......There are all kind of interesting avenues that flow from this idea. In one aspect, it really does turn psychotherapy on its head. We can now credit the body’s powers that we always knew it had, but never admitted.
.......When a person disowns the body they will never let it inform them, they can never trust it. Sometimes the body becomes the enemy. We can see why they lack vital emotional functions; why their intuition of other people and the environment is shot; also because they are disembodied why they can never be certain of themselves. We say they live in their heads – as though the head is the last domain they can occupy. Obviously they can think – and sometimes brilliantly – but that’s all. They lack the body’s imagination and its own kind of complex practicality, its holistic intelligence that can work without thinking. Of course, people in this state of deprivation do go on functioning because the body goes on doing its job on its own, doing its own thing without permission, help or credit, often against the opposition of the head-centred ego.
......Neuroscience is discovering how we can manipulate the brain and produced all kinds of subjective affects; and we know how chemical substances can do the same. But we forget that the body made the body in the first place and that subjective emotional experience can alter the body’s objective structure.
......The body stands at the crossroads. It is the only thing in the world that is also your conscious self. Our value of the mind has had a good go, but we are incomplete unless we can give the body its due. Not locating the mind in the body, but getting the mind as the body.