The embodied self and the other

Bodily experience and mentalization cannot be attributed to separate experiential fields, they are interrelated. Many twentieth and twenty-first century concepts of the embodied self in philosophy and psychosomatics have gone beyond dualistic models of mind and body. In accordance with these modern theories, a dialectical concept is presented that seems to be more adequate, highlighting two dialectical relationships. The first is between mentalization and bodily experience. On the one hand bodily experience always reaches beyond mentalization and on the other hand mentalization is constantly working on bodily experience and trying to represent it mentally. The second is between mentalization and intercorporeality. The embodied self is by no means a solipsistic self; rather, the mutual relatedness in a bodily encounter comes prior to all mentalization, which in turn remodels it into self-representations, e.g. the body image. These two dialectical relationships are important to take into account when trying to understand clinical phenomena, such as hypochondriasis, ideas of reference in schizophrenia or the psychological sequelae of Parkinson's disease.