Embodied Consciousness after 85 Years: The Issues of Body Transformation and the Paradoxical Nature of Embodiment

 

 Terminus Est

 I taught Lifespan Development at two community college during my 20 years of teaching psychology and massage therapy. It was one of my favorite courses along with Abnormal Psychology (always a blast) and MT Ethics (always a lively class). And now, much of what I taught about old age is now coming back to haunt me as I am now living the theory, as it were. The final chapter in my Principles of Somatic Psychology was entitled “Terminus Est: The Aging and Death of the Body.” Terminus est is a Latin term meaning “Here is the end,” “The end is here,” or “This is the end.” Sounds good in Latin, but is a rather grim image.

A large part of aging and dying is a changing relationship to one’s body. The final stage of life, according to Erik Erikson (1902-1994), is called “Ego Integrity vs. Despair” and it too deals with one’s relationship to his or her body. Ego Integrity is the realization of feeling whole and complete and satisfied with one’s accomplishments and choice. It is a state of minimal regret. Ego Despair is the opposite. and comes from the belief that one’s life was a series of bad choices and failures. It is a state of maximum regret. Part of this struggle between integrity and despair is played out in one’s changing embodiment. A person learns to accept and manage their bodily changes even reaching a point of psychologically and spiritually rising above them. This requires a great deal of self-acceptance, wisdom, and self-love. A person enters a spiritually enlightened relationship with their body. A person who fails in this task falls into a state of what I call here “Body Self-Absorption.” A person becomes fixated on their bodily ills and suffering and can think of nothing else. They become depressed, angry, hopeless, and bitter about their lives. Their body relationship has become distorted.

The Paradoxes of Embodiment

What is nature of this relationship? The nature of embodied consciousness is paradoxical. Three paradoxes, really. The paradoxical nature of consciousness comes from its ability to self-reflect. This leaves us, at certain times, in an odd experiential relationship to our bodies as demonstrated by the Three Paradoxes of Embodiment.

The First Paradox is I am my body and yet I am not my body. My body is solid and composed of organs and physiological processes, but more than that it is the center of my existence in the world. I see and experience my body changing, but I don’t feel that I as a core identity am changing. Related to this is the question of just how much of my body makes me me? If my arm is amputated or my face disfigured, does that make me less of a person? Bodily experience is a very large part, if not the entirety, of our waking lives. The body is lived both as a figure of experience depending on what is occurring in the immediate moment rather than the ground of that experience (also depending on what is happening in the immediate moment). You as a body are much more than just a physical shell and certainly are not just an object that happens to be alive. You are a person—a subjective point of awareness—and even if you were to lose your legs to a disease or, worse, the ability to move after a spinal cord injury, you would still the same person that you were before the accident.

The Second Paradox is I have a body and yet my body has me. Because the unconscious bodily activities are so much in the background of our awareness and our voluntary conscious activities are so much in the foreground we tend to live in a sort of an everyday “default feeling state” thinking that we have control over our bodies. And we do, for the most part, until something goes wrong. It is in these moments of bodily malfunction that we realize that we do not have total control and, worse, to realize that we really have very little control whatsoever. The body is both a permanent possession and inescapable prison.

The Third Paradox is I am a subjective body to myself, but can be made into an object by others or myself. The fact is that our bodies are material objects in a physical world, yet, unlike objects we are aware that we are made of physical matter.[1] That the personal consciousness of every individual is hidden but the body as a material object may be readily perceived by others makes the body the public self (Buss, 2001). Thus, every human is both a subject and an object.

The dynamics of aging call each of these paradoxes into focus as will be seen in a very interesting study entitled “The phenomenology of the body after 85 years” (Van Rhyn, Barwick, & Donelly, M., 2021).

The Bodymind Relationship in Old Age

 

Most knowledge of the body at the 85+ mark comes from medicine. There is relatively little direct knowledge of body experience at the end of life with the exception of a handful of body image studies (see Shane, 2023 for more). Much more is to learned about this last stage of life from an embodiment perspective (as with the other seven stages as well). Given the aging of not just the United States, but many other countries as well, the need for such knowledge is growing in importance.

Researchers interviewed 20 persons aged 85 to 103 (N=10 men and 10 women) and up guided by the question: What is the experience of the body at this age? (Van Rhyn, Barwick, & Donelly, 2021). The interviews were analyzed using van Manen’s context-sensitive phenomenological orientation. As background, phenomenology was devised by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and his students as a philosophical method to reveal the essential essence of a conscious experience. The method was famously used by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Jena-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961). Later psychologists modified the concept into human science phenomenology such as Dr. Amedeo Giorgi (1931- ) and his partner, the late Dr. Barbro Giorgi (1957-2007) with whom I studied with in graduate school. The Giorgis called their method that descriptive phenomenological psychological method. Van Manen’s method is to examine how people make sense of their life experiences in the most primal fashion possible (Van Manen, 2017a, 2017b). These methods all have several things in common. First, they attempt to stay true to Husserl’s idea of the epoche in which the researcher attempts to identify and compartmentalize his or her own prejudices and beliefs about the topic. Next, interview information is transcribed and then analyzed by themes of meaning. These themes are then reviewed to find the essence of the lived experience of the research subjects. Several themes emerged from the Van Rhyn, Barwick, & Donelly study.

Loss of body functionality

1. The body after a certain age just can’t do what it used to do. Particularly disturbing for the elder subjects was the loss of the ability to perform simple tasks such as getting dressed. Putting on socks was especially troubling.
2. Negative feelings about the body. Seniors experienced chronic feelings of frustration and embarrassment. Dismay and resentment at the deformation of the joints from arthritis.
3. Limited social contact. Pain, weakness, and incontinence limit social interactions.

Dependency Upon Others

1. Increased need for help from others. The more dysfunctional a person, becomes the more they become reliant on others.
2. Negative feelings about not being as capable as others. Frustration, guilt, and shame at not being able to physically participate in group events.
3. Need for physical assistance in transportation. Dependent upon others to assist them getting into and out of vehicles. Seniors are unable to get their walkers out of the care without assistance.

Increased Body Anxiety

1. The body is an unsafe space. Fear of falling because of injury and a sign of impending death.
2. The body cannot be trusted to fulfill normal functions such as walking.

Loss of Body Vitality

1. A pervasive fatigue affects the body constantly.
2. Increased number of aches and pains especially back pain.
3. Constant boredom for being so physically limited and sedentary.

Estrangement from the Body

1. Seniors report a startling incongruity or disconnect between their sense of self versus their body’s deterioration.
2. Management tactics include a drive for resiliency, acceptance, creative adaptation, and taking a humorous perspective on life.
3. Age-related changes are ego-dystonic meaning they don’t fit into personal identity.
4. Some seniors report making a conscious rejection of their bodies; e.g., “I am not this body.”

Closing Thoughts

 

Aging is a weirdly distressing thing. For most of the first half of my life, I was always the youngest person in any group or organization to which I belonged. That oddly changed one day without me knowing it and I began to see that I was older than the others around me. That comes with an uncomfortable feeling. In my youth, I was rather good looking and women would check me out when in public places. I notice that ceased once I was in my 30s. A sad loss for my ego, and even 30 years later I sometimes look back a little wistfully at that. More recently, and just shortly before I retired, I was in my office at my community college and was sitting with three persons younger than me. They were in their thirties and I noticed that they were all members of the same age cohort group, but I belonged to a far different one. Conversation about their interests and experiences did not include me. In fact, I was subtly excluded from the conversation. I felt that I didn’t exist to them in that moment and so I quietly retired to my office to contemplate aging. Aging changes your bodymind relationship as well as your relationship with other people.

In the Van Rhyn et al. study, I was particularly taken with the challenges of extreme old age shown in this research study and how people cope or fail to cope with the inevitable changes. We as body-owners live in a fantasy world where we think our bodies are utterly under our command. This is absolutely illusory as shown by the Second Paradox dealing with having versus being had by our bodies. And as age progresses, we are forced, one way or another, to disidentify with our bodies and enter the First Paradox of being-a-body and not-being-a-body. If this can be positively negotiated it leads to the state of Body Transcendence and the last stage of psychospiritual growth. It also leads in some cases to rejecting the body and consciously separating the mind from the body. This makes sense as it is a prerequisite condition for transitioning into death. In all, the last stage of life is the most challenging of all to the bodymind and yet, if met with courage and wisdom, may be the most spiritually enlightening of all.

Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT

Director, Academic Content

References

Shane, P. (2023). Principles of Somatic Psychology: A Transdisciplinary Approach for the Holistic Healthcare Profession. Brecksville, OH: Center for Bodymind Education. (www.bookbaby.com)

Van Manen, M. (2017a). But is it phenomenology? Qualitative Health Research 27(6), https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732317699570.

—– (2017b). Phenomenology in its original sense. Qualitative Health Research 27(6), https://doi.org/10.1177/1049732317699381.

Van Rhyn, B., Barwick, A., & Donelly, M. (2021). The phenomenology of the body after 85 years. Qualitative Health Research 3(12), p. 2317-2327.

[1] The technical term for this is “substantive self-consciousness” (Bermúdez, Marcel, & Eilan, 1995).