Abstract
In this article, the notion of re-embodiment is developed to include the ways that rearrangement and renewals of body schema take place in rehabilitation. More specifically, the embodied learning process of acquiring wheelchair skills serves as a starting point for fleshing out a phenomenological understanding of incorporation of assistive devices. By drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty, the reciprocal relation between acquisition habits and incorporation of instruments is explored in relation to the learning of wheelchair skills. On the basis of this, it is argued that through learning to manoeuvre the wheelchair, a reversible relation between is established between the moving body-subject and the wheelchair. In this sense, re-embodiment involves a gestalt switch from body image to body schema.
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Notes
E.g.: “‘figure and ground’ has a meaning only in the perceived world: it is there that we learn what it is to be a figure and what it is to be a ground. The perceived would be explicable only by the perceived itself, and not by physiological processes” (Merleau-Ponty 1963: 92).
This is a topic Merleau-Ponty treated at length in the structure of behavior (Merleau-Ponty 1963), where he argued, contra behaviorism, that the body does not wait for external forces to set itself in motion, because—as he would put it later—the body displays “a sort of prospective activity” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 4). Thus, the body is not an object solely governed by external forces.
Here is an experiment that illustrates this: Can you tell which finger you use to press the letter F on the key board of your computer? Most people who are somewhat proficient at typing wouldn’t. But if they sit down by their keyboard in order to write, the finger will find the letter immediately without the intervention of thought.
On a different level, experienced users also transform their wheelchairs by for instance peeling off manufacturers’ labels, taking off breaks and handles, and putting on stickers. In this sense the wheelchair is transformed into a personalized object invested with meaning (Standal and Jespersen 2008).
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Standal, Ø.F. Re-embodiment: incorporation through embodied learning of wheelchair skills. Med Health Care and Philos 14, 177–184 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9286-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9286-8