ABSTRACT
As a shift occurs in our understanding of health and well-being from evaluating measurements of on-going material processes in the body towards more holistic conceptualizations, it is important to have theoretical frameworks which enable us to articulate this new understanding. The coming chapter will provide such a framework by drawing upon the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to conceptualize health as a mind-body-world phenomenon. The dualism between mind and body is circumvented by his concept of “the lived body” and the dichotomy between the experiencing human being (as a mind-body presence to the world) and the experienced world is overcome in a new way of understanding the human way of being-in-the-world. This new understanding is particularly helpful in the area of psychosomatic pathology. The phenomenon of psychosomatic ill health presents a challenge to the classical dualistic biomedical paradigm, where health problems are either in the mind or in the body. Many of the enigmas surrounding psychosomatics can be solved by re-thinking our ideas about bodies and minds and how human beings exist in the world. The case of psychosomatic ill health will be used in order to show how insights on the lived body provide a fruitful grounding of health and well-being as a multi-dimensional phenomenon.
