In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Body as Alien, Unhomelike, and Uncanny: Some Further Clarifications
  • Fredrik Svenaeus (bio)
Keywords

anorexia, phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry, Freud, Heidegger

I want to thank the commentators for bringing the phenomenological analysis of anorexia that I attempted in my article yet some steps further. Phenomenology of illness is a young field and in the case of anorexia there remains much to be said and done. ‘Capturing the “double experience,” the paradoxicality embodied in anorexia,’ was exactly my aim and I am grateful to Drew Leder for bringing home many of my points in such an explicit and systematic manner (Leder 2013, 94). Dr. Leder’s study The Absent Body, published already in 1990, is one of the earliest and most important attempts to understand the ways of the body in illness from a phenomenological perspective, an attempt that has been central to my own understanding, not least in the present article (Leder 1990). I am also thankful to Katherine Morris for pointing toward some potential misunderstandings of and unclear distinctions in my analysis of anorexia that force me to be more explicit on exactly how I intend the phenomenology of the body uncanny in anorexia to be read.

As I write in the article: “Anorexia nervosa is a psychiatric disorder that appears to be closely related to the identity of the person suffering from it” (Svenaeus 2013, 81). And it is closely related to identity in a manner that highlights the way a person’s body represents the most fundamental being-at-home, and, at the same time, potential not-being-at-home, of the person in question. This double experience of the own-body is characteristic of human embodiment as such, as Richard Zaner points out in the book I quote from in the article (Zaner 1981). The not-being-at-home with the body can make itself known at any time—through fatigue, hunger, thirst, pain, itches—but is intensified and brought to the point of being a major nuisance in various forms of illnesses, as I have tried to analyze elsewhere (e.g., Svenaeus 2011). The way I understand Zaner’s phenomenological analysis of the body uncanny (in the quote and in the rest of his book), it is intended to get hold of this alien nature of embodiment which makes itself known when the body displays needs and idiosyncrasies that I do not control or is able to influence: “If there is a sense in which my own-body is intimately mine, there is furthermore, an equally decisive sense in which I belong to it—in [End Page 99] which I am at its disposal or mercy, if you will,” as he puts it (Zaner 1981, 52). Uncanniness is simply a further intensified quality of this potential unhomelike-alien nature of being embodied, as I read and understand him. The experience of the own-body as uncanny is a fearful and horrifying experience because it reveals a not-being-at-home that is hidden at the very nucleus of our most intimate being-at-home: the body.

That the German etymology of unheimlich (uncanny) points toward unheimisch (unhomelike) is a point made by both Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger in attempting to understand (among other things) the nature of existential anxiety (Svenaeus 2000). However, neither of these philosophers gets hold of the central relevance of the lived body for the understanding of the uncanny. For Freud, the source of the foreign at the heart of my home being is that which he names the unconscious, and for Heidegger the source is that which he names the openness (and concealment) of Being as such. The strength of the analyses found in Zaner (1981) and Leder (1990) is the localization of the source of alienness–uncanniness in the domains of the lived body. This is also where my understanding of anorexia begins and I think this focus on the lived body represents a fresh start for anorexia research in which other features characteristic of the disorder (I mention some of them in the article) can be anchored.

My body is not the only thing that can be uncanny; the bodies of other persons can also appear in an...

pdf

Share