The Absent Body by Drew Leder
The book examines how modern medicine, technology, and cultural attitudes render the lived body absent—treated as an object rather than the site of subjective experience—and argues that this estrangement erodes bodily awareness and alters the meaning of suffering and healing. Drawing on phenomenological insight and clinical examples, it analyzes how pain, illness, and diagnostic practices expose a conflict between the body's presence as experienced and its absence as an objectified specimen, producing phenomena like phantom limbs, depersonalization, and the silencing of bodily testimony. It calls for recovering the body's lived presence in medical care and everyday life to restore agency, ethical attention, and a fuller understanding of what it means to be embodied.
- Published
- 1990
- Nationality
- American
- Length
- Unknown
- Pages
- Unknown
- Original Language
- English
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- Alternate Titles
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