Embodiment: Clinical, Critical and Cultural Perspectives on Health and Illness

This book is for students of psychology, medicine, nursing and other health sciences.

It lucidly illustrates why neither a simplistic mind-body dichotomy, nor the parallelism of the biopsychosocial model, sufficiently captures people's experience of being a body.

Such experience is most salient when the body is in some way distressed, diseased, disordered, disabled or dismembered.

Adding to the intriguing sociological and philosophical literature on embodiment, the book illustrates how such a seemingly abstract term has tremendous clinical significance to many people's experience.

Drawing a parallel with recent exciting work on neural plasticity, "Embodiment" illustrates how we are now in an age of 'body plasticity'; where our body boundaries are becoming increasingly ambiguous, allowing us more 'degrees of freedom' and offering more opportunities than ever before to overcome physical limitations.

The book draws on research from diverse areas, including health and clinical psychology, neuroscience, medicine, nursing, anthropology, philosophy and sociology: it is a key resource for students of these disciplines.