THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE BODY
In the English language, as in many others, third-person referents are specifically gendered ("he" or "she," that is, a male or a female physically and psychologically). But unlike most other Western languages, in English the indeterminant third-person referent is embodied: somebody, anybody, everybody, even nobody (not embodied). Even "anonymous" has a body. Human existence of any kind is both gendered and embodied.
We cannot separate human life from the body. All our experiences in this world-sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, simple and complex feelings of all kinds, our sense of time (which defines history, among other things) and place, what we perceive and what we ignore--are brought to us courtesy of our physical selves. Senses, feelings, the mind itself, are all embedded in, coexistent with, our physical selves. Our bodies are sending and receiving devices engaged in the circular exchange of information with the environment and with others. They are also as much the repository of experience as are the realms of mind or feeling. Experience imprints itself on the face, the hands, the body, the musculature, and even the bone structure of every individuaL These elements contain the residue, the evidence of experience, that makes us who we are in every sense, induding the physicaL From the most material to the most symbolic, the overt to the implicate, we are what we experience.
However, the psychological and the physical have been approached as separare realms in Western, post-Cartesian thought. In addition, thinking and feeling are considered not only separare and different but largely psychological in nature. While certain Reichian- based schools of psychotherapy do locate feelings in the body, cognition is generally considered not to be physically located or to be located only in the brain, separable from the body and from feeling. Although our language provides for these distinctions, it does not allow us to indicare that these systems-thought and feeling, the physical and the psychological, the intrapsychic, the interpersonal, and the sociocultural-are all present in any human activity, are all part of the same event. As part of gender training, each of us is taught selective awareness and selective expression. As part of early education in Western society, each of us is taught to split and categorize our experiences; thus dualism appears natural to us.
Let us consider sorne examples of the embeddedness of the psychological and the physical in each other. A manual laborer develops physically and psychologically in a much different manner than an office worker, not only with regard to musculature but in the degree of connectedness to the physical. In order to perform the required task, an office worker must learn not to experience many bodily sensations and needs, while a manuallaborer must pay attention to the physical. An individual who tends to worry a lot eventually embeds anxiety into the musculature, posture, facial lines and expression, and into interna!organs such as the heart, stomach, and intestines; and, in that way, is also physically disposed both to worry and to stress-induced íllness. Many diseases have been shown to be induced by chronic stress, and even the healing of a simple wound can be slowed by certain emotions.
The relatively new field of psychoneuroimmunology is beginning to demonstrate that immune cells produce every kind of hormone that the brain' produces, that our bodies and minds are not dualities at all but are inextricably intertwined. As another example, when individuals who suffer from multiple-personality disorder change from one self to another, such presumably stable physiological features as allergies or visual acuity change as well (Miller I989; Kluft I987). One personality may need glasses to see, another may have perfect vision; the actual shape and curvature of the eye undergo a physical! psychological change. The more habitual the psychological state, the more it inhabits the body. The more it inhabits the body, the more it may induce the psychological, or at least a predisposition thereto, so that the physical is also embedded in the psychological.
Paul Ekman (I983) has suggested, based on his cross-cultural research, that people experience the same physiological changes when they force themselves to make the facial expression characteristic of a particular feeling. Smiling, for example, can lead to a feeling of happiness. The physical movement seems to induce the physiological changes in the same way that the subjective state does.
I realize that I am coming dangerously close to resurrecting the James-Lange theory of emotion (Lange and James I967, long out of fashion, which postulares that the physiological response precedes psychological awareness of an emotion, whích is then actually deduced by the person experiencing it. For example, I feel afraid only after experiencing and making meaning of my pounding heart or sorne other physiological response to fear, or I register sadness after noticing my tears. I reject the linearity and unidirectionality of this model for the same reasons I would reject one that considered thoughts or emotions to take precedence over other aspects of human experience. I suggest instead that experience ís both contaíned in and expressed by the body, as well as by the mind, and that each aspect is embedded in and constantly influenced by the other. Experience can emerge to awareness first in either of these realms, depending on the situation and the person's characteristic style of expression, but it is always expressed and experienced in both. Better said, there is no true "both, "except insofar as we are taught to divide and categorize our experiences. Instead there is a unified, complex experience.
The physical self, then, receives, mediares, and is temporarily and permanently altered by all experience and information and, in turn, expresses to the surrounding people and environment various aspects of the indívidual's experience, feelings, and beliefs, all of which take root and are slowly, but firmly, planted in the body. A seemingly unlikely reference for a feminist analysis, Nietzsche once noted quite astutely that "every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way" (in Heidegger I979, p. 2I8). Each of us develops his or her own body of knowledge, a living, breathing, moving understanding. While that body differs for each of us, it also contains general common elements. The mosr basic of these have to do with gender and organize the physical, as well as the psychological, experience from the first moments of life.
Once developed, they also predispose us to respond in certain ways to certain situations and ro eliminare alternative responses. For example, a woman in danger on the streets may freeze or try to hide or be ingratiating. In fact, it has been shown that, in response to intrusion, women do freeze more (Mahoney I974; Unger I979) and also maintain a tenser posture at rest (Mehrabian I968) than do men. Battered women may not fight back, and the masculinist viewpoint would see them as colluding or asking for it, since a man in the same situation would be expected to fight back. But a woman's body and mind are typically trained differently from a man's-to feel rather than to act, to be disarming rather than to disarm-and women cannot be blamed for being one way when a situation presumably calls for the other.
Every individual inhabits a body, and eventually habit sculpts its forms. This does not mean simply that different feelings or experiences are localized in different parts of the body-as certaín somatically oriented therapies propose, dividing experience again into corporeal compartments-but that each experience is embedded in every aspect of the body and of the mind. Heinz Pagels (I988 offers the analogy of kneadíng food coloring into dough: after severa rounds of kneading, the coloring becomes evenly distributed throughout the dough. Such is the case with gendered experience and the physical body. Thus, we all become the bearers of tradition, the keepers of the gender system. Memories are stored everywhere, not just in our minds. Or, better said, the mind's realm is not confined to the brain. lntelligence exists at all levels of experience.
In the highly gendered sociery in which we live, the nongendered question really has no meaning. Even the most basic question about the realm of the physical cannot be reduced or separated from the issue of gender and is instead transformed into "What does it mean to have a female or a male body?" As Carole Vanee has pointed out, the task then becomes to "describe and analyze how cultural connections are made between female bodies and what comes to be understood as 'women'" (I984, p. I0. How does the experience of gender change the body and shape feelings, sensations, and thoughts?
A woman of some forty years enters my ofiict:. She moves very carefully and hesitantly, stopping at the door and waiting. Although she is just my height, she keeps her head lowered in such a way that she has to look up at me. She doesn't seem sure whether to close the door behind her or wait forme todo it. She waits. She asks where she should sit and Iindicate which chair is for my clients, although it is obvious from the conliguration of the room. She sits down, removes her shoes, and tucks her legs under her body. She wraps her arms around her body as if to hold herself in and silently waits.
This is my perspective, what I see. What information has been conveyed about her, her body, her self-concept, her relationships with others? What would this same scene look like from an androcentric perspective? From her own?
In those moments she has expressed, in a highly encoded manner, an enormous amount of information about herself. Perhaps she seems attractive and feminine, likable. She is being a good little girl, taking up little space, waiting for dues and cues. Perhaps she is afraid, uncomfortable, waiting to be judged. Perhaps she feels hopeful, angry, despairing, too small to be seen, too insignificant to be helped. Perhaps she is conscíously aware only of a slight sense of discomfort. Perhaps she is so concerned about how she is being viewed that she does not know her own physical experiences and sensations. Perhaps she scarcely remembers to breathe, so intently is she anticipating my response. Perhaps her posture and musculature "naturally" fall into this position from years of doing so and she is not consciously aware of it.
Has she expressed and experienced all these varying emotions and sensations in gender-appropriate ways? Has she learned her lesson or defied it? What is the effect of my presence, my perspective, my gender on her physical presentation of self? How might her behavior differ in the presence of a male therapist (in general, and with a particular male therapist, since I am also a particular female therapist)? Most important, how much of what she experiences is habitual and unconscious, so well embedded in her body and her identity that they also influence her experience of herself? If her body has been trained to be hesitant and tense in new situations, does this lesson show? The answers to all these questions are encoded in the language of the body and must be considered by the therapist within a contextually complex feminist approach.
Now, what if I told you that she is a black woman? Were you picturing her as a generic (read white) woman? If you now think that you know something additional about her, something about the potential effect of racial identity, then you have missed the point. A white woman is of a particular race-and dass-as well, both of which contextually locate her gendered attríbutes and behaviors. To consíder gender and class relevant only when someone is not white or not middle class means that one is viewing all women as white and middle class, unless otherwise noted. This is no different from viewing all people as men.
Now what if our imaginary client were a man?
A man of some forty years enters my oflice. He moves very carefully and hesitantly, stopping at the door and waiting. Although he is just my height, he keeps bis head lowered in such a way that he has to look up at me. He doesn't seem sure wherher ro elose rhe door behind him or wait for me to do it. He waits. He asks where he should sir and Iindicare which chair is for my clients, although it is obvious from rhe conliguration of the room. He sits down, removes his shoes, and tucks his legs under his body. He wraps his arms around his body as if ro hold himself in and silently waits.
What do I know about him, his body, his self-concept, his relationships? From this description, it would be easy to infer that he is either severely depressed and/or atypically feminine, depending perhaps upon whether this ís a temporary or permanent demeanor for him. Was the woman depressed or femínine or both? These qualities are not as easily separated in her case because, for women, they are not necessarily índependent qualíties. We must consíder the interstices of the social and the personal. Altering the gender of the client in this manner permíts us to see how behaviors and attributes reflect the personal embedded in the culturally gendered. It is most instructive that a description of a depressed-sounding man makes him appear more like a woman.
A young man enters my oRice. He wants to impress me favorably, to please me, to communicate to me his sincerity, because I am in a position to recommend to the court concerning the custody of his young child. He is eager to gain custody. He moves carefully and in a contained manner. He waits forme to indicate which seat he should take, concerned that he not "accidentally" take my seat or offend me in any unconscious physical way. He also sits in a contained manner,looking at me directly, leaning forward. He asks how to address me and waits forme to control the interview. He is being careful not to exercise dominance.
Like a woman, he is concerned about my judgments, my perception of him before his own. In this case, however, he is consciously aware of this, while she is generally not. This attitude may be so embedded in her physical and psychological makeup that her bodylmind takes charge in this