Abstract
In the Romantic philosophy of the poet William Blake, the human body reveals the soul to the senses. This apparently simple idea adds a significant dimension to care for the body, which should never be seen as only physical. In its gestures, illnesses, beauty, and signs of aging, it reveals a great deal about the condition of the soul. Conversely, by addressing the needs of the soul in patients, health care workers could seriously affect their physical health. This approach requires sensitivity to image in many forms and to the role of the erotic in attending to the body.
MAN has no body distinct from his soul." 1 This line from William Blake could fundamentally transform thought about the body in sports, medicine, dance, acting, furniture and architecture, or psychotherapy. Look at the body, and you see the soul. Look for the soul, and you will find it in a facial gesture, physical illness, posture, and all signs of aging. Blake goes on, "That call'd Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses." 1 If the body is the soul, then anyone who works with the body should know that it is never just a piece of flesh.
The mythology, the deep defining narrative that colors our thinking today, for the most part unconscious to us, causes us to see the body as a purely physical thing. You see this body in medical offices and consulting rooms in images that betray the notion of the body accepted by the practitioner. If you encounter a skeleton in your doctor's office, whether real, plastic, or painted, you know that in the back of his or her mind this physician sees the body, at least to an extent, as a structure. This doctor is focused on essentials and abstractions. Sometimes in an examining room you'll notice plastic organs or a color chart on the wall, ready to serve explanation and analysis. This closer approximation to the flesh is not necessarily comforting. It is still an abstraction, a lifeless, personless approximation of a body that gives the illusion of the body as we experience it but is incomplete.
If I were a physician, in my office I might have a painting by Vermeer or a sculpture reproduction by Rodin. I'd really prefer a Magritte. In any case, I would want to show the body with personality, in a particular place, in a world that itself has a body and soul. I don't say this sentimentally. The fact is, we know our bodies only in time and place, only as expressive of the lives we are living internally and externally. Not only the body itself, but illnesses and weaknesses, strength and beauty, are qualities of a body in place, expressive, and ensouled. And no matter how old we are, ours is a body in constant change. The body is not only always in process, it also constantly reveals the conditions of the soul-its emotion, fantasy, memory, and even meaning.