The Conscious Body

Perrin Elisha delves into the underlying bias in psychology and psychotherapy that views the mind and body as separate, and that views the mind as having a higher status than the body in all contexts. Elisha confronts the fact that most people in Western contemporary culture-psychologists as well as lay people-have come to think of psychological space, what we think of as consciousness, as somehow not really being located in the body.The author's lively examination of the mindbody split moves from the classical ideas all the way up through Western history to modern psychology and the intriguing findings of neuropsychology. A rigorous, metapsychological review of the evolution of a central idea in psychology, this book not only enlightens readers to the unconscious biases in their own thinking, but points to a new way to view the mind-and all the brilliant complexity of consciousness-as embodied.