The Mindful Body
The Mindful Body
In the article, Scheper-Hughes and Lock examine the western beliefs associated with the mind and the body. In doing so they present three ways the body can be viewed, there is the individual body, social body and the political body. The individual body is the one that we all use in order to distinguish our individual self from others in society. The social body refers to how the body is represented as a symbol in order to think about nature, society and its cultures. The political body it the one that refers to the group of people that make up a politically organized nation or state and the control of bodies in this group as a whole and as individuals.
Concerning the individual body, the western belief is one that the mind and the body are separate entities and never considered as one, as shown by the dilemma of the medical students when it came to diagnosing the sick woman. “Yet, even in psychoanalytically informed psychiatry and in psychosomatic medicine there is a tendency to categorize and treat human afflictions as if they were either wholly organic or wholly psychological in origin: "it" is in the body, or "it" is in the mind”. When going to thee doctor there are different ways to treat ailments depending on the symptoms. If I was to tell a medical professional that I was hearing voices and suffered of hallucinations and delusions I would be sent to a psychiatric doctor. Depending on what is affecting the body in what way, it is treated differently. Although the mind is part of the body as a whole, it gets treated as two separate entities, but the majority of the time treatments include medications. Todays, modern society seems to use medication to solve any ailment of the body even those that have to do with the mind. For example, children who are unable to concentrate and are constantly in motion are diagnosed with ADHD and given medication to help.
We separate these two aspects that make up
In the article, Scheper-Hughes and Lock examine the western beliefs associated with the mind and the body. In doing so they present three ways the body can be viewed, there is the individual body, social body and the political body. The individual body is the one that we all use in order to distinguish our individual self from others in society. The social body refers to how the body is represented as a symbol in order to think about nature, society and its cultures. The political body it the one that refers to the group of people that make up a politically organized nation or state and the control of bodies in this group as a whole and as individuals.
Concerning the individual body, the western belief is one that the mind and the body are separate entities and never considered as one, as shown by the dilemma of the medical students when it came to diagnosing the sick woman. “Yet, even in psychoanalytically informed psychiatry and in psychosomatic medicine there is a tendency to categorize and treat human afflictions as if they were either wholly organic or wholly psychological in origin: "it" is in the body, or "it" is in the mind”. When going to thee doctor there are different ways to treat ailments depending on the symptoms. If I was to tell a medical professional that I was hearing voices and suffered of hallucinations and delusions I would be sent to a psychiatric doctor. Depending on what is affecting the body in what way, it is treated differently. Although the mind is part of the body as a whole, it gets treated as two separate entities, but the majority of the time treatments include medications. Todays, modern society seems to use medication to solve any ailment of the body even those that have to do with the mind. For example, children who are unable to concentrate and are constantly in motion are diagnosed with ADHD and given medication to help.
We separate these two aspects that make up