Disembodiment

This book explores disembodiment, the experience of feeling alienated from one’s own body, and shows how it emerges across clinical and social domains. It begins with an account of embodiment as the foundation of lived experience, interpersonal connection, and cultural inscription, before examining how disruptions of body image, body schema, ownership, and agency destabilize this balance. Clinical cases illustrate different pathways into disembodiment: the alien limb in BIID, the loss of presence in depersonalization and PTSD, the fractured agency and hyper-reflexivity of schizophrenia, and the distorted body image of anorexia. The analysis then turns to racial disembodiment, where systemic racism and the white gaze impose estranging perspectives that reshape subjectivity at multiple levels. To link these phenomena, the book introduces the uncanny as a framework for understanding how the familiar body becomes strange, and concludes by exploring re-embodiment techniques—from sensory illusions to VR—that open therapeutic and social possibilities.