Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
that the medicine will work seems to be almost as important as the medicine
itself.
Discussion and concluding comments
In this chapter I have tried to listen to Prozac by way of phenomenology,
responding to the invitation of Peter Kramer, made in his much-read topic
from 1994: Listening to Prozac . My strategy has been to understand the
relationship between normal feelings and pathology on the phenomenological
level, rather than, as Kramer does, asking head on if SSRIs provide a cure
that make, not only the ill, but also the healthy, “better than well”, by
changing their personality traits. My discussion of bodily resonance as a
being tuned in different ways, offered above, touches upon this, but it
does not give any comprehensive answer to the question whether Prozac
is a cure for mental illness, or rather a mood- and personality-enhancer.
To be honest, I do not think it is possible to give a straight answer to this
question, since the disposition of being attuned in different ways through
bodily resonance is not necessarily either an illness or a personality trait. It
could be both at the same time, since the lived body is both mine and at the
same time alien. I do not fully control the ways of the body; it has a kind
of life of its own (autonomous functions), in which it can take on alien
qualities (Leder 1990, Svenaeus 2000). And yet the lived body is also me,
my point of view on the world, which makes transcendence to the world
by way of attunement possible. Bodily resonance is a kind of activating
passivity . When the passive aspects of embodiment become too foreign
and painful, we talk about illness. When the passive aspects are simply
the corner-stone of what is me, we talk about personality (melancholic,
sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, or more modern differentiations made by
twentieth century psychologists).
We live in a culture in which self-formation is becoming more and more of
a mission, instead of something pre-given. This might seem like a paradox:
has not recent biomedical progress in areas such as molecular biology
and neurophysiology changed our views on personality in a deterministic
direction, by which the infl uence of social environment on the individual has
become less important in determining how he is and what he will be? Well,
yes and no.
First, the social predetermination of an individual's life plan has loosened
up, at least in the minds of people. You are no longer born to be what
your father or mother were, and this has changed self-formation radically,
especially for women, who are no longer born to be only mothers and wives.
This ideal of fi nding your own way in life, rather than relying on social
traditions, has been bred all over the Western world, in the last 50 years
or so, by a very infl uential ideal, summed up by the phrase “the American
dream”: it is up to yourself and nobody else who you are going to end up
being (Elliot 2003).
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