If we lose something, it often feels as if the object is deliberately hiding from us, or as if some troll in a chat is personally targeting us. This reflects the way we sometimes relate to ourselves as an object of anger.
The same dynamic can appear in our relationship with the body. In certain moments the body begins to feel like a separate object, carrying out someone’s malicious intentions, introducing something into us that feels uncontrollable. The body—especially when it is in pain—quickly becomes an enemy. Only when it functions “normally” do we treat it as a friend.
In my massage practice, I have observed how these processes begin very subtly. The first signs of fatigue in my own work appeared as inflammation around the nerve endings in the wrists. Earlier, during my first job in cleaning, both of my hands developed symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. Many illnesses are connected with professions and have physiological explanations. And yet sometimes something as extraordinary as pregnancy can make these symptoms disappear—as if the “evil intent” of the body suddenly vanishes.
So what is really happening in the body? Are these isolated points of dysfunction? Or is there a personal history that connects our entire life into one continuous material narrative?
The illusion of health, just like the illusion of pain or bodily safety, forms the basis of many of our misconceptions. We tend to believe that we were born to be healthy and happy, while madness or delirium belong only to “other people,” the unhealthy ones.
But what if this delirium is not so different from the human belief in a grey-haired old man sitting on a cloud? Illusions that function with the same psychological necessity as the image of the heavenly father we pray to each morning.
At the moment I am reading Patosophy—a philosophy of pathology—and beginning to understand what “soma” means from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is opening a deeper layer of comprehension and acceptance of the phenomena of the body: a source of continuous balance that accompanies us from birth to death.
In the photo there is a page from the book—one that could easily silence a few fairies.
