Body Dysmorphia and the Phenomenology of Embodiment

This paper explores the relationship between phenomenology and body dysmorphia. This is, to explain, a disorder in which the sufferer perceives, and is obsessed by, defects in appearance which are either non-existent or severely exaggerated. I will see how Husserl’s and Sartre’s analyses of embodiment can explain the radical uncertainty, and anxiety, about appearance that underscores this condition. Their accounts of the body-as-lived reveal first of all an essential intimacy between body and self that the “objective”, material, view of the body covers over. Second, however, their analyses show that there is always also an essential elusiveness of the body before our attempts to grasp or know it. Taken together, these points indicate how body dysmorphia arises. If there is an essential project of the self to know the body, but this is necessarily frustrated, then we can see how an obsession and anxiety surrounding bodily appearance can emerge.