Barely Touching: A Social Perspective on Mind and Body

It is a mark of the perduring Idealism of our culture that the “body” side of the mind/body relationship has been neglected, or, to put the same point another way, that the major studies of the mind/body problem have been philosophical rather than material-social. Even the direct physical anguish of the flesh, as in the experience of disease, fails to challenge our preferences. The nineteenth-century tuberculosis victim, his or her body wasting away, was somehow “spiritualized” by the process, just as in an analogous way, twentieth-century Freudianism represents a final if backhanded vindication of the ultimate sovereignty of consciousness. Perhaps