Clinic of corporeality or psychopathology of contemporaneity

Abstract

The body shown today by culture, psychopathology, and daily life has lost the deep meaning of the intimacy with the self to become a character on stage in search for author, a surface where to write down identitary dynamics, a battlefield of psychic events, all projected outward, on the skin. In fact, as evidenced by Bauman (2011), we live in a society that seems to have eliminated the boundaries between public and private, made the public exposition of the private a virtue, and canceled from the public communication whatever resists in reducing life a private confidence. This essay arises from this contemporary perspective as an attempt to understand the most extreme experiences of the body, acted today. In particular, several, current phenomena will be discussed, such as: the experience of pain in the borderline personality disorder; selfie-harm and the new risky behaviors in adolescence; the almost unknown phenomenon of cutting among elite athletes; orthorexia and the obsession for the “clean” food; the abuse of aesthetic surgery and related gender disturbances.