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Psychological Medicine, 1990, 20, 23-33

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A short history of bodily sensation*JEAN STAROBINSKI1

From the Faculte des Lettres, Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

In one of his Cahiers, Paul Valery has the note.Somatism (heresy of the end of time),Adoration, cult of the machine for living.1!

Have we come to the end of time? The heresyanticipated by Valery has almost become theofficial religion. Everything is related to thebody, as if it had just been rediscovered afterbeing long forgotten; body image, bodylanguage, body consciousness, liberation of thebody are the passwords. Historians, prey to thesame infection, have begun inquiring into whatprevious cultures have done with the body, inthe way of tattooing, mutilation, celebrationand all the rituals related to the various bodilyfunctions.2 Past writers from Rabelais toFlaubert are ransacked for evidence, and im-mediately it becomes apparent that we are farfrom being the first discoverers of bodily reality.That reality was the first knowledge to enterhuman understanding: 'They knew that theywere naked' (Genesis 3.7). From then on, it hasbeen impossible to ignore the body.

Nevertheless, body consciousness, as it ispracticed and spoken of in our society, doeshave certain new and original aspects that it isimportant to bring out and whose antecedents itwould be useful to set in order in sound geneticfashion. But so as not to let myself be led astray(and because I believe that the most fruitfulgeneralizations are those arising from fairlyprecise studies of limited topics), I will confinemyself to a somewhat circumscribed area: theinternal perception of our own bodies -cenesthesia - which is undeniably a componentof our contemporary 'sensibility', whetheramong philosophers or writers, or in certainpsychotherapeutic practices (e.g. Schulz's

' Address for correspondence: Dr Jean Starobinski, Faculte desLettres, Universite de Geneve, 3, Place de 1' Universite, 1211 Geneve4, Switzerland.

* This article first appeared in Humanities in Review, vol. I, 1982,published by the New York Institute for the Humanities, andtranslated by Sarah Matthews.

f The notes will be found on pp. 32-33.

'autogenic training', relaxation, 'bodycontacts'), or, finally, in psychoanalytic think-ing.

We shall not dwell on the theories developedby the ancients, however fascinating they mightbe; but let us recall a few stages of earlierthinking, before pausing a little longer over thediscussions that prevailed at the end of thenineteenth century and Freud's response tothem.

In Antiquity, the disciples of Aristippus ofCyrene spoke of an ' internal contact' - tactusintimus in Cicero's translation.3 Montaigne,quoting Cicero, reminds us that 'theCyrenaics... maintain that nothing external tothemselves is perceptible, and that the onlythings that they do perceive are the sensationsdue to internal contact, for example, pain andpleasure'.4

For a long while, pain and pleasure were notattributed to a specific sensory system; theywere called 'bodily passions', whereas thetraditional term, internal sense (sensus internus),referred to the conscious activities that the minddeveloped in and of itself (reason, memory andimagination) on the basis of information pro-vided by the external senses (sight, hearing,taste, touch and smell). According toAristotelian doctrine, the information providedby the external senses reached the internal senseonly after having been unified by the commonsense (sensorhim commune, koinon aistheteriori).b

The body was in no way forgotten; but as longas Galenic medicine prevailed, it was principallyby way of the humors, and not through nervousinformation, that the body was capable ofmodifying the activity of the soul and, in turn, ofbeing modified by the soul.

In his treatise The Passions of the Soul,Descartes put forward a clear distinction be-tween three different categories of perception:' that which relates to objects external to us' (art.23), 'that which refers to our body' (art. 24),

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24 / . Starobinski

and 'that which refers to our soul' (art. 25).Bodily sensations were of many kinds:The cognizings we refer to our body, or to certain ofits parts, are those we have of hunger, thirst and ofour other natural appetites - to which may be addedpain, heat and the other affections which we sense asin our limbs, not as in external objects.6

Descartes thus analyzes and classes sensoryactivities as belonging to three specific areas - thebody, the world and the consciousness - dailyexperience of which leads us to an awareness ofhow they coincide and are superimposed oneupon the other. But Descartes's influence in thisregard was not particularly great amongeighteenth-century doctors. Some of them, par-ticularly in Montpellier, were more taken byStahl's ideas, which conferred on the viscera asort of relative autonomy and independentsensibility. Nonetheless, some philosophers,such as Lignac, Turgot or d'Alembert, spokewith precision of a 'sense of coexistence with ourbodies', of an 'internal touch' and so on.7 Someof them (for instance, Bordeu, Lacaze andDiderot) came to pick out a phrenic or dia-phragmatic center, whose role merged with thatof the splanchnic nexus of the sympatheticnerve. Cabanis, in 1800, attributed great im-portance to the ' organic sensations' that endedin certain centers of reaction, the most importantof which was, obviously, the brain. Thus, theinstincts were the transformation, at the level ofbehavior, of the most long-standing and mostpersistent of organic sensations. Instinct, thus,could be seen as the motor branch of asensorimotor connection, the sensory branch ofwhich was made up of 'organic sensations'.

It was in 1794, in Halle, in the title of adoctoral thesis at which Johann Christian Reilpresided and of which he was the inspiration,that the word coenesthesis was used for the firsttime. The term was equivalent to the GermanGemeingefiihl, for which the French equivalentsubsequently became on some occasionssensibilite generate (general sensibility) and onothers ce'nesthe'sie (cenesthesia).8

Reil (through the medium of his discipleHubner) returned, without mentioningDescartes, to the tripartite division that we havealready seen in The Passions of the Soul.We encounter in the soul three sorts of representa-tions, which differ in relation to the objectsrepresented.

(1) Its own intellectual state, its powers, its actions,its representations and concepts; it distinguishes thesethings itself, and in this way becomes conscious ofitself.

(2) It represents to itself its external state or therelations of the whole man to the world.

(3) Finally, it represents to itself its own bodilystate.Each of these sorts of ideas, by which man isrepresented according to the three different types ofstate, is sited in the body in its own particular organicapparatus.

(1) Cenesthesia, by means of which the soul isinformed of the state of its body, which occurs bymeans of the nerves generally distributed throughoutthe body.

(2) Sensation (sensatio externa). This is excited bythe senses and represents the world to the soul.

(3) Finally, the activities which originate and arecarried out integrally within the organ of the soul.[Organ der Seek is the term Reil uses to designate thebrain.] By means of these (that is to say, by theinternal sense) imagination and judgement are formed;the soul receives the representation of its powers, itsideas and its concepts, and is thus rendered consciousof itself.9

This distinction between three specific organicapparatuses can be found again at the beginningof our century, but without any direct referenceto Reil, in Carl Wernicke. He proposed, as iswell known, a model of psychic life that involvedcollaboration between an allopsyche (in relationto external objects), a somatopsyche (in relationto corporeal existence) and an autopsyche (inrelation to its own system of representations).10

In Reil (as in Wernicke), this functional distinctionformed the basis for a pathogenic classification.Reil not only envisaged changes in cenesthesiadue to general disorders, but he allowed there tobe idiopathic disorders of the cenesthesia: therewere in fact cases in which the disease was limitedto the nervous apparatus involved in trans-mitting the somatic information - in the absenceof any real lesion in the visceral organs or in thebrain itself. A distortion (the anatomo-patho-logical substratum of which Reil was entirelyincapable of indicating) then sent a misleadingmessage to the brain about the body's condition.A bodily illusion occurred - giving rise to abelief in a tumor or an abdominal parasite,depite the lack of any objective evidence. Up toa certain point, judgment could correct thisfalse impression. But when the impression



A short history of bodily sensation 25

managed to take hold, it created a state ofmadness. A good hundred years before theconcept of cenestopathy appeared in France(with Dupre and Camus), Reil included in hispsychiatric nosology a class of ailmentscharacterized by a primary disturbance of bodilyrepresentations. This very extensive classcontained the classic examples that had occurredfor the previous two or three centuries inchapters on melancholia or hypochondria:people who believed themselves to be made ofglass and liable to shatter at the slightest blow orwho had lost the feeling of being present withintheir actual bodies. Reil had no difficulty addingaffective disorders or derangement of theinstincts or the appetites, such as pica, bulimiaand polydipsia on the one hand, and nympho-mania and lubricity on the other.

'Romantic' thought readily welcomed theconcept of cenesthesia. From a genetic point ofview, Reil had already accorded it priority in theorder of sensory activities: it was the first thatappeared in the fetus. Evolutionist speculation,right up to physiologists like Purkinje, couldpropose the notion of a primary bodily sensefrom which all the other sensory activities couldbe seen as being differentiated developments. Asthe first vital sensation, cenesthesia could beconsidered, by some, to be the source of allpsychic life, insofar as that life was made up ofsensory differences. What came to prevail,among scholars or philosophers claiming to bedeterminists or monists, was a 'sensualist'conception of mental life, which opened the wayfor a sort of imperialism of cenesthesia. Ifmental life was determined by sensory activity,and if all sensory activity was made up ofderivatives of cenesthesia, then one could finishby asserting, as Ribot did in 1884, in TheDiseases of the Personality, that our personalityresided entirely in the messages, partially un-conscious, that derived from bodily life.

The fifteen French editions of Ribot's TheDiseases of the Personality (published between1883 and 1914) bear witness to the immenseinfluence exerted by this book and justify a fairlyclose examination of the theories propounded init.

A first assertion was based on physiology: 'Its[consciousness's] production is always associatedwith some activity of the nervous system. ' n Inaccord with the physiologists, however, Ribot

allowed that a significant part of nervous activitymight remain unconscious:' All nervous activitydoes by no means imply psychic activity -nervous activity being far more extended thanpsychic activity. Consciousness, accordingly, issomething superadded.'12 It was, but it wasdoomed to intermission. (Ribot underlines theterm, a term to which, as is well known, Proustwas to attach great importance.) The personalitywas thus a variable kaleidoscopic phenomenon,by very reason of the incessant fluctuation ofbodily states.

If, accordingly, we admit that the organic sensationsproceeding from all the tissues, organs and movementsproduced - in a word, from all the states of the body- are in some degree and form represented in thesensorium; and if the physical personality be onlytheir sum total, it follows that personality must varyas they vary, and that these variations admit of allpossible degrees, from simple distemper to the totalmetamorphosis of the individual. Instances of'doublepersonality'...are but an extreme case...We shouldfind in mental pathology enough observations toestablish a progression, or rather a continuousregression from the most transient change to the mostcomplete alteration of the ego...The ego exists onlyon the condition of continually changing.13

Following Ribot, Sollier proposed an in-terpretation of hysteria as the result of changesin cenesthesia: Seglas attributed to this same'peripheral' mechanism states of depersonaliz-ation and melancholic deliria of negation.

One would have no difficulty in demonstratingthat what one is dealing with here is an entirelytheoretical construction, supported in large partby an entirely metaphorical method of argu-mentation. The fundamental assumption is of acausality that operates on the basis of elementarymaterials, in which complex phenomena arebuilt up from simple units. Ribot refers to Taine,who himself refers to Dr Krishaber to maintain:'The Ego, the moral person, is a product ofwhich sensations are the prime factors'.14 Tothis neosensualism are added curious politicalmetaphors, which could have flowed only fromthe pen of a convinced democrat. Thus, afterhaving declared that 'in every animal the basisof its psychic individuality is the organic sense,'he adds.

But, in man and with the higher animals, the turbulentworld of desires, passions, perceptions, images andideas covers up this silent background. Except at



26 J. Starobinski

given intervals, it is forgotten, from the fact that it isnot known. Here the same takes place as in the orderof social facts. The millions of human beings, makingup a large nation, as regards itself and others, arereduced to a few thousand men, who constitute itsclear consciousness, and who represent its socialactivity in all its aspects, its politics, its industry, itscommerce and its intellectual culture. And yet thesemillions of unknown human beings - limited as tomanner and place of existence, quietly living andquietly passing away-make up all the rest; withoutthem there would be nothing.15

Ribot, in the closing sentences of the book,introduces terms like consensus and solidarity,which have an equally clear social resonance.

The unity of the ego, in a psychological sense, is,therefore, the cohesion, during a given time, of acertain number of clear states of consciousness,accompanied by others less clear, and by a multitudeof physiological states which without beingaccompanied by consciousness like the others, yetoperate as much and even more than the former.Unity, in fact, means coordination. The conclusion tobe drawn from the above remarks is namely this, thatthe consensus of consciousness being subordinate tothe consensus of the organism, the problem of theunity of the ego is, in its ultimate form, a biologicalproblem. To biology pertains the task of explaining, ifit can, the genesis of organisms and the solidarity oftheir component parts. Psychological interpretationcan only follow in its wake.16

What this radical biologism lacked, withoutyet having at its disposal the more recent conceptof the genome, was any apparatus of clinicalexperiments and proofs. It was hardly surprising,then, that after a brief moment of glory this'peripheral' theory of the constitution of theego, and above all the interpretation it suggestedof disturbances of the personality, became theobject of lively criticism. Ribot was the first toadmit its shortcomings17 and recognized laterthat in attributing so great an importance tosomatic sensory information, he had neglectedthe motor components of psychic activity. PierreJanet18 observed that in all the cases ofdepersonalization he had examined, he hadnever been able to demonstrate any kind ofperipheral sensory disturbance and, as a cor-ollary, that when dealing with tabetics whosebodily perceptions were seriously upset, he hadnot noted any psychic disturbances. To allege adisturbance in 'corporeal sensoriality' was,according to him, to remain trapped in a

'metaphysical' hypothesis. Psychopathologicalphenomena, such as depersonalization or a senseof emptiness, should be considered as a lack ofaction (or lack of the psychic energy availablefor action) and not as a disturbance in sensoryreceptivity.' Scientific psychology must considerpsychological facts as actions and express themin terms of action. A sense of emptiness is adisturbance of action and not of the sensibilitynor of a poorly understood consciousness'.19

This led Janet to introduce a distinction betweenwhat he called 'primary actions' and 'secondaryactions'. Primary action takes its cue fromsensory stimuli, whether internal or external,and reacts directly to them; secondary actionbrings to primary action the reinforcement of abelief, an integrating device effective in thecircumstances experienced. Pathologicaldisturbance, in depersonalization, affects thesecondary action, which can break down withoutthe primary action showing the slightestanomaly. It is in the 'relation to the real' thatthe real disturbance is to be found.

The affirmation of the primacy of the activeresponse over somatic information was alsocharacteristic of Freud's thinking. But beforelingering more closely over a few significantpages of Freud, it would be appropriate todevote a moment to the theory put forward byCharles Blondel in La Conscience Morbide(1914). (Both a doctor and a philosopher,Blondel began as a careful follower of theteachings of Durkheim and Bergson; after thewar, he wrote one of the first important studies ofProust and composed a hasty and disappointingwork on psychoanalysis.) In La ConscienceMorbide, Blondel opposed to the 'peripheraltheory' an active force - and this active forcewas language. It was not that the cenestheticmessage was nonexistent, but it was not itssupposed disruption that explained thedisturbances of the sick mind. According toBlondel, a purely physiological theory wasincapable of explaining the phenomena observedby the clinician. The 'cenesthetic masses' (whichhe also called 'pure psychology') did not bythemselves determine mental illness: the' morbid' factor lay entirely in the insufficiency ofthe verbal response to the bodily perceptions -a response worked out by the individual in theact of thinking according to the linguistic toolshe has received from society. Noting, as Dupre




had done in his studies on cenestopaths, that thementally ill had recourse to a wealth ofmetaphorical formulas with which to describetheir symptoms,20 Blondel sited the anomaly notin the (supposedly neutral) bodily nervousinformation but in a fault in the 'eliminatoryaction' that should have resulted from a suc-cessful intervention of language. The normalmind, according to Blondel, eliminates the idio-syncratically individual, the 'pure psychology,'by putting into effect the interpretive tools andconcepts provided by the system of collectiverepresentations. The law of language, which isthe result of social training, has as its functionthe depersonalization of the expression that wegive to our individual states. Blondel quoted inthis respect a revealing passage from Durkheim.

There really is a part of ourselves which is not placedin immediate dependence upon the organic factor:this is all that which represents society in us. Thegeneral ideas which religion or science fix in ourminds, the mental operations which these ideassuppose, the beliefs and sentiments which are at thebasis of our moral life, and all these superior forms ofpsychic activity which society awakens in us, these donot follow in the trail of our bodily states, as oursensations and our general bodily consciousnessdo...This is because the world of representations inwhich social life passes is superimposed upon itsmaterial substratum, far from arising from it.21

Blondel concluded from this that the normalmind was a mind in which the cenesthetic factorwas dominated and controlled by the impersonalsystem of socialized discourse. While believinghimself to be asserting his ego, the rationalindividual was in fact affirming the triumph ofcollective norms. The disturbed mind, incapableof manipulating language according to thesecollective dictates, was a mind embroiled in theindividual cenesthetic experience - in the non-verbal or the preverbal, which even the mostdaring play of metaphor was incapable ofexpressing. Blondel did not fail to remark thepoetic nature of these attempts, which tended toimply that poetry was deviant from the socialnorms, that it was sited on the side of 'purepsychology', that it had something in commonwith the 'sick mind'.

It was thus not the body that imposed its lawon the mind. It was society that, through theintermediacy of language, took the commandsof the mind and imposed its law on the body.

Blondel's theory tended to dispose of the bodyas cause in order to return to it later as the agentof the expressive intentions that the individualimposed on it under the dictates of the collectiveconsciousness. Thus, we can see interest shiftingfrom the body as physiological object (primarilythe producer of internal information destined tobe filtered by language) to the body according tosociety (primarily carrying out messages bearingmeaning, according to the collective codes andrules). Social prescriptions dictated not onlylanguage, but also nonverbal bodily manifesta-tions; there is nothing, in the passage thatfollows, that could not be quoted with approvalby any of the sociologists or ' paralinguists' oftoday who talk to us of' the body as a mediumof expression \22

In order to find the motor or vasomotor expression ofour states of mind, we are dumbly preoccupied inseeking the right note, of finding the mime, regulatedand defined by custom and propriety, correspondingto the emotion standard to which our own emotionrefers. From this point of view mime seems, so tospeak, to have received its morphology and its syntaxfrom the collective... If one thinks about it hard, itbecomes apparent that there is not a single one of ourmotor manifestations which is not thus more or lessstringently defined and with regard to which theredoes not exist a collective model, that is to say, amotor concept, to which it has to conform.23

In writing the Traumdeutung, Freud began byrunning up against the generally held late-nineteenth-century theories which assumed thatdream activity derives from peripheral or visceralsensory excitation. Ribot, in The Diseases of thePersonality, had formulated in passing a theoryof the dream that was in perfect accord with therest of his theory of the primacy of cenesthesia.

Constantly active, they [the physical bases of thepersonality] make up by their continuity for theirweakness as psychic elements. Hence, as soon as thehigher forms of mental life disappear, they pass to thefront rank. A clear example of this exists in dreams(whether pleasant or painful) aroused by organicsensations, like nightmares, erotic dreams, etc. Inthese dreams, even with a certain degree of precision,we may assign to each organ the part that belongs toit.24

Freud, well aware of the vast body of literaturethat, even before Ribot, tended in the samedirection, devoted several pages of his historicIntroduction to Leibreiztheorie (he used the



28 J. Starobinski

term Gemeingefuhl more rarely) and concludedthat ' the theory of somatic stimulation has notsucceeded in completely doing away with theapparent absence of determination in the choiceof what dream-images are to be produced \2 5 Hereturned to the question again in Chapter 5('The Material and Sources of Dreams'), sectionC ('The Somatic Sources of Dreams').

Freud did not deny that ' organic impressions'played their part in the production of dreams.But he did not allow that they could be a sufficientcondition and the only cause: it was not enoughto invoke them to be free of the need to provideany other explanation. Like Janet, Freud wasopposed to a purely physiological theory, themore so to one that might be unifactorial orunicausal, according to which dreams were seenas being merely the cerebral propagation,through loose associations, of visceral sensorystimuli. He noted that these stimuli were notalways efficient; organic sensations, by defini-tion, are never interrupted, whereas dreamsare intermittent:' These stimuli are present at alltimes, and...it is difficult to understand, then,why the mind does not dream continuously allthrough the night'.26 In a number of cases, adream may derive solely from psychic sources.And even when the presence of somaticsensations can be admitted with a certain degreeof probability, they can be seen as being simplythe material to which work is then applied fromquite another quarter, and that alone gives itmeaning. In relation to its somatic sources, thedream is a 'reaction', an interpretive workingout, and our scientific attention should bedirected to that reaction; our interpretationshoud be of the act of interpretation carried outby the dreamer.

There can be no doubt that physical cenesthesia...isamong the internal somatic stimuli which can dictatethe content of dreams. It can do so not in the sensethat it can provide the dream's content, but in thesense that it can force upon the dream-thoughts achoice of the material to be represented...Thecenesthetic feelings left over from the preceding daylink themselves up, no doubt, with the psychicalresidues which have such an important influence ondreams. This general mood may persist unchanged inthe dream or it may be mastered, and thus, if it isunpleasurable, may be changed into its opposite.

Thus, in my opinion, somatic sources of stimulationduring sleep (that is to say, sensations during sleep),unless they are of unusual intensity, play a similar

part in the formation of dreams to that played byrecent but indifferent impressions left over from theprevious day. I believe, that is, that they are broughtin to help in the formation of a dream if they fit inappropriately with the ideational content derivedfrom the dream's psychical sources, but otherwisenot. They are treated like some cheap material alwaysready to hand, which is employed whever it is needed,in contrast to a precious material which prescribes theway in which it is to be employed. If, to take a simile,a patron of the arts brings an artist some rare stone,such as a piece of onyx, and asks him to create a workof art from it, then the size of the stone, its color andmarkings, help to decide what head or what sceneshall be represented in it. Whereas in the case of auniform and plentiful material such as marble orsandstone, the artist merely follows some idea that ispresent in his own mind.2'

All that the somatic sources do, then, isprovide one of the most common materials, ofwhich the mind of the dreamer, working fromother sources, will make something of its own.Freud, in his turn, has recourse to metaphors;the image of the sculptor brings us back toAristotelian notions of causality. In Aristotelianterms, the somatic source is, in the best sense,the material cause of the dream. But theneurophysiological is not simply a neutral andanonymous substratum. The dream has mean-ing because of the form imposed on thissubstratum. This setting into form is the resultof an intention, of which the active agent iscalled the 'spirit', the 'wish', 'dream-work'.Freud assigned a double aim to the dream: toprotect sleep and to fulfil a wish. In both cases,the dream works according to its own ends,against the somatic sensation - either toneutralize it or to transform it. Accepting thesepostulates entails an important consequence foranyone wishing to achieve an adequate under-standing of dreams. It is vain to trace dreamsback to their physiological source and to invokea particular visceral disturbance, which could bemeasured in terms of the strength of the painfulstimuli or in variations in the cardiac rate. Whatone now has to understand is the new language,the original form in which this material - initself unimportant - has been interpreted andrecast by the dream. Analysis is an exegesis ofthe final cause of the dream: it seeks tounderstand what the wish is aiming for, andwhy.

In other words, dream analysis can be seen as




the 'informed' interpretation of a 'naive' in-terpretation, which has itself been reworked atthe moment of narrating the dream. But thisformula is still too simple; for the somaticstimulus is the starting point for a doubletranslation. First, it gives rise to the deploymentof latent thoughts, in which the wish can expressitself without reserve; then it transports itself-through the distortions and puzzles of whichFreud so carefully established the vocabulary -in the manifest dream. The 'somatic source', thematerial cause, was in addition only an oc-casional cause, a pretext. Freud did not fail torecognize this, but he felt it unnecessary toreiterate it. This meant in effect reworking thedefinition of the unconscious. Despite what isfairly widely believed today, it was quite usual tospeak of the unconscious before Freud's time,but it was an unconscious associated with theobscure murmurings of visceral functions, fromwhich would emerge, intermittently, consciousacts. For Freud, the unconscious was the firstinterpretation of visceral stimuli, it was thelatent thoughts of the dream and the process thatgave form to the manifest dream. Freud'soriginal contribution was not to have spokenfirst of the unconscious but to have, so to speak,lifted the monopoly held on it by organic lifeand to have installed it within the psychicapparatus itself. It was thus at the price ofabandoning the body (in which it was definableonly in terms of weakness or strength, whetherorganic or 'nervous') that the unconsciousbecame the custodian of a language and theproducer of palimpsests or puzzles that werethen open to being deciphered. Having ceased tohave the life of the body as its exclusive source,the unconscious then escaped from the exclusivecompetence of a medical approach and becamedependent on hermeneutics.

Thus, before Durkheim and Blondel opposedto cenesthesia the conceptual categories oflanguage set up by the collective consciousness,Freud, in 1900, opposed to cenesthesia, to'organic stimuli', the operation of language, buta language in which the social norms were onlypartially represented - by censorship andinterdictions. Another similarity - apart fromany questions of priority - is worth noting:though the body might see itself being refusedany sort of importance as a causal source ofpsychic disturbance, it found a crucial role for

itself as the place or scene in which thisdisturbance manifested itself. In a vision thatplaced in the background the sensory infor-mation being provided by the body, and thatemphasized the reaction manifested in thepsychic act and in language, the body came toappear as the primary target of the act and asthe primary signification worked out in thelanguage. Just as Durkheim and Blondel, afterhaving rejected the hypothesis of a cenestheticsource of psychosis, reestablished the importanceof the body as bearer or enactor of manifesta-tions of a gestural code of social origin, so Freudequally returned to the body, no longer con-sidering it as explanatory source but as the placein which were carried out the expressive aims ofthe wish. Breuer and Freud had already takenthis direction in their studies of hysteria. Thecase of the dream was equally clear; and amongthe different types of dream, the nightmareprovided a typical example.28

Received medical opinion held thatnightmares were the representational transpo-sition of a purely somatic oppression. Accordingto Freud, such a case was the exception; thegreatest number of somatic sufferings felt indreams were, on the contrary, the representationof a censored wish loaded with suffering: whatcould not be denied was that the suffering thenexpressed itself in the language of the body,though the 'source' should be sought in thepsyche. The inquiry should turn from thedisturbed body to the affect that was oncerevealed and hidden in the somatic register. Thebody was the wrong turn, the dead end taken byenergy originating from the psyche, and towhich the term intention was more appropriatethan excitation.

At this point, it seems that in marking a radicaldifference between psychological explanationand physiological explanation, in 'dephysiol-ogizing' psychology, Freud was 'desomatizing'the causal system commonly accepted by hispredecessors. There is, in Freud's explanations,less body and more language than in the majorityof his contemporaries; this explains the dis-sension that was to grow, at least for a while,between psychoanalysts and neurophysiologists.Freud took care never to sever the links withbiology (which is far from being the case withsome of those who subsequently claimed to behis followers). To be sure, what Freud retained



30 / . Starobinski

of biology did not consist of experimentallymeasurable mechanisms but, rather, of generalschemes and of supposedly permanent laws ofthe nervous system and living matter. If Freudianpsychology became detached, to some extent,from the physiological body, metapsychology, incompensation, showed itself to be a return tophysiology and to the body in an intuitive andimaginative manner, but guided by phenomenathat had been established sufficiently securely byexperimental physiology to serve as models. Oneof the most illuminating texts in this regard isthe 1915 study entitled Instincts and TheirVicissitudes. The physiological model on whichFreud's thinking was based was that of stimulusand response, the sensorimotor reflex arc. Tothis was added another physiological assump-tion : 'The nervous system is an apparatus whichhas the function of getting rid of the stimuli thatreach it, or of reducing them to the lowestpossible level; or which, if it were feasible, wouldmaintain itself in an altogether unstimulatedcondition.>M

On the basis of these assumptions, Freudestablished a distinction (a distinction alreadylargely foreshadowed in the writings ofnineteenth-century physiologists on instincts andpassions) between external excitation, which isusually unique and momentary, and internalexcitation, of somatic origin, which acts 'as aconstant force', whose effect is translated as'need', and whose satisfaction, whose 'mastery',cannot be carried out according to a singlemuscular response, such as flight, which wouldconstitute the adequate response to the externalexcitation. Not only does the instinct derivefrom a somatic source, but its satisfaction can beobtained only by a set of actions directed towardthe exterior. The individual must bring into playa series of complex behavior patterns, the aim ofwhich is to modify (to reduce) 'the internalsource of excitation'.

Where the dream was concerned, the ' somaticsource' was optional. Where instincts wereconcerned, there was no question of its centralrole. But Freud, while conceding it precedenceby right, by the status of a necessary conditionand a material cause, in fact declared it to beirrelevant to the psychological investigation. Atthis level, physiology would have been incommand had it not been (provisionally?

definitively?) disarmed; as for psychology, itcannot say much.

By the source of an instinct is meant the somaticprocess which occurs in an organ or part of the bodyand whose stimulus is represented in mental life by aninstinct. We do not know whether this process isinvariably of a chemical nature or whether it may alsocorrespond to the release of other, e.g. mechanical,forces. The study of the sources of instincts liesoutside the scope of psychology. Although instinctsare wholly determined by their origin in a somaticsource, in mental life we know them only by theiraims. An exact knowledge of the sources of an instinctis not invariably necessary for purposes of psycho-logical investigation; sometimes its source may beinferred from its aim.30

First remark: The transition from somatic topsychic, in the case of the instinct, is not theperceptive order; the instinct is not simply thecry of the organ echoed and recorded. At leastFreud does not lay any emphasis on this element,which would immediately raise the question ofits more or less conscious character. The concepthe used was that of representation (reprdsentieren),which implies an operation of a ' semiotic' nature.This foreshadows the' second topic', in which theid can be seen to take on a good part of thisrepresentative function.

Second remark: Contrary to what happenedwith the dream, the somatic source is regained atthe end of the instinctual activity, since the aim ofthe instinct is a modification in the source ofexcitation. But this aim, at first held to beinvariable, can have others substituted for it.Thus the 'physiological' return to the somaticsource does not take place. That phenomenon,displacing the site of satisfaction creates to someextent an illusory body which has nothing to dowith the true (organic) body.

The aim of an instinct is in every instance satisfaction,which can only be obtained by removing the state ofstimulation at the source of the instinct. But althoughthe ultimate aim of each instinct remains unchange-able, there may yet be different paths leading to thesame ultimate aim; so that an instinct may be foundto have various nearer or intermediate aims, whichare combined or interchanged with one another.Experience permits us also to speak of instincts whichare ' inhibited in their aim', in the case of processeswhich are allowed to make some advance towardinstinctual satisfaction but are then inhibited or




deflected. We may suppose that even processes of thiskind involve a partial satisfaction31.

If 'inhibition in their aim' implies a relativeavoidance of the normal bodily satisfaction, asidetracking or diversion in relation to thenecessary 'modification of the source', con-sideration of the object of the instinct brings upa number of substitute possibilities, amongwhich our 'own body' is called upon to play amajor role.

The object of an instinct is the thing in regard towhich or through which the instinct is able to achieveits aim. It is what is most variable about an instinctand is not originally connected with it, but becomesassigned to it only in consequence of being peculiarlyfitted to make satisfaction possible. The object is notnecessarily something extraneous: it may equally wellbe a part of the subject's own body. It may bechanged any number of times in the course of thevicissitudes which the instinct undergoes during itsexistence; and highly important parts are played bythis displacement of instinct.32

Our 'own body' thus appears, in the wide-open repertoire of places (that in which) or ofmeans (that by means of which) that the instinctcan choose in order to obtain its aim and onwhich it can on occasion become fixated. That isthe case when there occurs - as in narcissism ormasochism - a ' turning around of an instinctupon the subject's own self.

Thus there appears a new role for the body; Iwas about to say a new body - the body assupport for fixation or investment. And there isnothing to stop a new representation, prolongingor transforming that in which the somaticexcitation has already been prolonged ortransformed. We have not left the body. But ifit is true that there persisted, for Freud, a distantanalogy between the simple reflex arc and theway in which instincts work, then one could saythat the body-object, the body of investment,corresponds to a motor performance, whichseeks immediate confirmation in the order ofperceptions, without being able to avoid gettingmixed up in a whole imaginary or symbolicprojection. When Schilder33 came to study theimage of the body, he paid very little attention tothe primary bodily schema, as derives from thedifferent kinesthetic or somesthetic apparatuses;he was much more concerned with the image, in

part fantasized, that accompanies the differenttypes of libidinal investment. What Freudestablished, through a system of representationstaking over one from the other, was a circuitthat could renew itself virtually infinitely: fromthe body as the source of the instinct to the bodyas aim, site or means of 'satisfaction'.

All that I have done here is to recall, in a verysimplified form, the essential characteristics thatmake it possible to place Freud's thinking in thehistory of ideas about cenesthesia and bodilysensations. His contribution was considerable:before him, cenesthesia was the first stage ofa system of sensory information, from whichsprang the personality, fully armed. Whetherconscious or unconscious, these physiologicaldata exercised their full power straightaway. Allthat remained to the higher centers was tosubmit to their law, or to respond as best theycould; the traditional model included two terms,in relation to reciprocity. Traditional medicalthinking used to be able to make only this simpleaccount, reiterated in innumerable nineteenth-century works, which started in visceral irritationand ended in, for instance, mania (or vice versa),or started in a break in the apparatus of thesomatic sensibilities and ended in depersonaliz-ation. In Freud, instincts had a goal and gaverise to much longer and more circumstantialaccounts, as he pursued their migrations, theirsubstitutions and the meshing of different aimsor objects. It was now a complex circuit that hadto be considered, and no longer a simple shortshuttling between 'action' and 'reaction'. Thefeeling of depersonalization, for instance, is aloss that occurs at the end of a long process;Mourning and Melancholia traces the variousstages, in which the first false step is the choiceof a narcissistic object. It has no relation to theprimary organic and sensory dysfunction thatRibot thought to discern.

At the beginning of this essay, I almostsuggested a synonymity between cenesthesia andawareness of the body. But after our rapidrereading of Freud, and recalling what he saidabout the 'turning around of an instinct uponthe subject's own self in narcissism and maso-chism, there is a question that cannot be avoided:Where do we draw the line between cenesthesia,which must be a basic assumption of everyhuman existence, and body awareness, which



32 J. Starobinski

would be the hypochondriacal or perverse conse-quence of a narcissistic or autoerotic investment?

Sartre (who is, through Dumas, so close toRibot's ideas) would answer without a moment'shesitation that the manner in which we 'existour contingency' reveals itself to us incenesthesia.

When no pain, no specific satisfaction or dissat-isfaction is 'existed' by consciousness, the for-itselfdoes not thereby cease to project itself beyond acontingency which is pure and so to speak unqualified.Consciousness does not cease ' to have' a body.Cenesthetic affectivity is, then, a pure, nonpositionalapprehension of a contingency without color, a pureapprehension of the self as a factual existence. Thisperpetual apprehension on the part of my for-itself ofan insipid taste which I cannot place, whichaccompanies me even in my efforts to get away fromit, and which is my taste - this is what we havedescribed elsewhere under the name of Nausea. A dulland inescapable nausea reveals my body to myconsciousness34.

As for Merleau-Ponty, the discussion of thenotion of the bodily schema leads him to assertthat 'one's own body is the third term, alwaystacitly understood, in the figure-backgroundstructure, and every figure stands out against thedouble horizon of external and bodily space'.35

But if to this inevitable and naive presence of thebody-a 'nonpositional' (Sartre), 'tacit'(Merleau-Ponty) presence - is added anintentional awareness, it is then appropriate toask, with Freud, whether this interestpresupposes a regressive or narcissistic libidinalinvestment. What I devote to an awareness ofthe body, I subtract from my presence in theworld, from my investments in the other. In aconscious awareness of the body, the aestheticelement of cenesthesia is in the nature of aninstinctual satisfaction undeniably confused withprimary physiological information. It is a vari-ation on' turning around upon the subject's ownself. There is nothing very bold in drawing theonly superficially banal conclusion that thepresent infatuation with the different modes ofbody consciousness is a symptom of the con-siderable narcissistic component characteristicof contemporary Western culture. I am, I know,far from being the first to say so. The so-calledChicago school, Richard Sennett,36 and a varietyof others have made such a declaration, basedon other premises, a recurrent motif in their

critical thought. Perhaps one could also enter aplea on behalf of Narcissus (or at least invokeextenuating circumstances in his favor). In aworld in which technological mastery has madesuch rapid strides, can one not understand thatthe desire to feel - and to feel oneself- shouldarise as a compensation, necessary, even in itsexcesses, to our psychic survival?

NOTES1 Paul Valery, Cahiers (Paris: Pleiade, 1973), vol. 1,

p. 1126.2 Cf. Robert Brain, The Decorated Body (New

York: Harper & Row, 1979); Victoria Ebin, TheBody Decorated (Thames and Hudson, 1979).

3 Cicero, Academica 2.24.4 Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Presses Universitaires

de France, 1965), p. 587.5 Aristotle, De anima 3.2.6 Descartes, Traite des passions de Fame, in Des-

cartes' Philosophical Writings, trans. NormanKemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1953), p. 290.

7 Cf. Georges Gusdorf, Naissance de la conscienceromantique au siecle des lumieres (Paris, 1976), pp.285-316.

8 'Coenasthesis, dissertatio [...] quam praeside J.C. Reil, pro gradu doctoris defendit Chr. Friedr.Hiibner' (Halle, 1974).

9 On the history of the concept of cenesthesia in thenineteenth century, cf. Jean Starobinski, 'LeConcept de cenesthes'ie et les idees neuro-psychologiques de Moritz Schiff,' Genserus 34(1977), fasc. 1/2, pp. 2-20.

10 Carl Wernicke, Grundriss der Psychiatrie, 2nd ed.(Leipzig, 1906).

11 Ribot, The Diseases of the Personality (Chicago,1891), p. 5.

12 Ibid., pp. 5-6.13 Ibid., p. 30.14 Hippolyte Taine, De Fintelligence, 12th ed. (Paris,

1911), vol. 2, p. 474.15 Ribot, Diseases of the Personality, pp. 19-20.16 Ibid., p. 157.17 Notably in Problemes de psychologie affective

(Paris, 1906), p. 26.18 Pierre Janet, De Fangoisse a Fextase, 2 vols.

(1926; new ed. Paris, 1975), vol. 2, chs. 1 and 2.19 Janet, De fangoisee a Pextase, vol. 2, ch. 2, sec. 8,

p. 71.20 Ernest Dupre, Pathologie de Fimagination et de

rdmotivite (Paris, 1925), pp. 289-304.21 Charles Blondel, La conscience morbide (Paris,

1914), p. 264. The quotation refers back toDurkheim, The Elementary Forms of the ReligiousLife, trans. J. W. Swain (London, 1915), p. 271.




22 See, among others, Ted Polhemus, ed., SocialAspects of the Human Body (London: Penguin,1978); Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus,eds., The Body as a Medium of Expression(Londom: Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 1975).

23 Blondel, La conscience morbide, pp. 259-260.24 Ribot, Diseases of the Personality, p. 25.25 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,

trans. J. Strachey (London, 1955), p. 39.26 Ibid., p. 226.27 Ibid., p. 237.28 Ibid., p. 236.29 Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,

in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-logical Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, J. Strachey(London, 1964), vol. 15, p. 120.

30 Ibid., p. 123.31 Ibid., p. 122.32 Ibid., pp. 122-123.33 Paul Schilder, The Image and Appearance of the

Human Body, Psyche Monographs: No 4 London,Kegan Paul, 1935.

34 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.Hazel E.Barnes (London: Methuen, 1967), p.338.

35 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Per-ception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,Kegan & Paul, 1962), p. 101.

36 Richard Sennett, 'Le narcissisme et la culturemoderne,' in Former Fhomme, Rencontres Inter-nationales de Geneve (Neuchatel, La Baconniere,1979), pp. 187-203.

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