Subjective and physical dimensions of bodily self-consciousness, and their dis-integration in anorexia nervosa.

The present investigation concerns the multidimensionality of self-consciousness. I will specifically address this general issue by focusing on bodily self-consciousness and by considering how one is conscious of one's body through consciousness of both its physicality and its subjectivity. Here, physicality is defined as the belongingness to the physical world; subjectivity is defined as the fact of being a subject of conscious experience. Once subjectivity and physicality are differentiated from each other, the difficulty is to clarify the integration of these dimensions of bodily self-consciousness into a single experience of one's body: how does the consciousness of one's body integrate one's consciousness of one's body-as-subjective and one's consciousness of one's body-as-physical? In this investigation, I describe different forms of bodily self-consciousness in ways that shed light on the intermingling of subjectivity and physicality. I argue that being conscious of one's body-as-subjective involves experiencing one's belongingness to the physical world; conversely, being conscious of one's body-as-physical involves experiencing it as one's own; either way, such forms of bodily self-consciousness involve experiencing both the subjectivity and the physicality of one's body. The hypothesis here is that the imbalance of these dimensions relative to each other would be pathological. I will thus underline the normal multidimensionality of bodily self-consciousness by considering its pathological breakdown as it happens in anorexia nervosa. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.