Phenomenology
Can you experience health, not only illness?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
De Boer rejects the idea that health stays invisible until breakdown. Health becomes present in the not-always-harmonious interaction between the lived body and the body-as-object.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Other — Phenomenological account of how health becomes present via lived-body/object-body interaction
- N
- Philosophical phenomenology; not an empirical sample
- Population
- Everyday and medical experience of health under increasing bodily objectification
- Outcome
- Health as experientially present in lived/object-body tension, not only as illness breakdown
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Key findings
Everyday healthy experience is often pictured as harmonious alignment, but medicine increasingly objectifies the body. Exploring objectified health matters because that object-attention is part of how health shows up, not only how it disappears.
Methodology
Against views that presuppose a smooth alignment of subjective and objective body (so health would be absent), he asks how health is experientially present, using Merleau-Ponty on the subjective body that links us to the world and evades biomedical objectification.
Limitations
This is a phenomenological essay, not a patient survey. It does not offer a clinical score of ‘objectified health’.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Health can be experienced as a not-always-harmonious interaction between the lived body and the body-as-object, not only noticed when it breaks.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
The distinction between the lived body and the body-as-object is the method's basic working tool. It lets de Boer argue that health becomes experientially present in the not-always-harmonious interaction between the two, and lets Mehling and colleagues define body awareness as an aspect of embodied self-awareness that is usually taken for granted on the lived body but can be modified by attention.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Across the set, the output is an argument rather than a dataset. The papers describe themselves as essays, reconstructions or legal-philosophical analyses; none produces a clinical score, a cohort or a trial, and several say so explicitly in their limits.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Whether health is experienced at all. Mehling and colleagues follow the standard phenomenological line that on the lived body awareness is often taken for granted or 'absent', which fits the view that health is the unnoticed background of illness. De Boer rejects that view, arguing that health becomes present precisely when the body is turned into an object of attention.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Open questions
Tensions this paper is part of
From concept pages' “where studies disagree.” Disagreement means the same question; scope means different assays, populations, or outcomes.
Whether health is experienced at all. Mehling and colleagues follow the standard phenomenological line that on the lived body awareness is often taken for granted or 'absent', which fits the view that health is the unnoticed background of illness. De Boer rejects that view, arguing that health becomes present precisely when the body is turned into an object of attention.
- Supports · What do mind-body therapies share?
Related papers in this topic
Same topic cluster — not a recommendation engine.