A book on the psychology of the body? What could muscles, skin, and bones have to do with psychology? How can the stuff of bodies be implicated in the "psyche?" These are the questions at the heart of this original exploration of the psychological body. The answers that emerge are an innovative and speculative beginning for a psychology of the body, as talk of bodies permeates other disciplines.

All articles in this collection were previously published in the journal Theory & Psychology. The book, however, has an expanded introduction by editor Henderikus Stam, which provides a necessary and valuable background. Stam contends that "psychology has not taken the body seriously in most of its current manifestations" (p. 6). Therefore, chapters focus on alternative conceptions of embodiment. Appropriately, the goal of the collection is "an invitation to reconstrue psychology as a discipline of bodies" (p. 1), while simultaneously challenging the notion of disciplinary investigations into the body, since the very nature of body resists neat partitioning into disciplines.

The first of three main sections seeks to integrate social and psychological perspectives on bodies. Each of these chapters is critical of the "social construction" of the body. Alan Radley uses the social theory of Simmel, phenomenology of Merleau-- Ponty, and symbolic interactionism of Goffman to argue that bodies display social conditions and the possibilities for social worlds. Relying on many rich examples drawn from everyday life, Radley finds embodiment (the ways bodies are deployed in social relations) to be a basic "condition of human existence" (p. 28), and therefore a crucial phenomenon for psychologists. Sampson contends that social constructionism has failed to take seriously the notion of embodiment. He criticizes Judith Butler, a popular gender theorist, for being more concerned with a "third-person" body and the discursive nature of the body. He is equally dissatisfied with phenomenological approaches, which examine the "lived flesh" of the body, but fail to understand embodiment as a basis for knowledge and practice. Ultimately, Edward Sampson calls for a politics of embodiment, the ways in which bodies are the site of oppression. Harry Kempen is similarly dissatisfied with cultural studies on the self because they have mistakenly overemphasized variability in the body. The key to his project is to understand the "universal subjectifying body or embodied selfing process" (p. 65), the aspects of self that are "at the same time universal and variable" (p. 58). He proposes we look at an embodied self, a "corps-sujet" (p. 59). In other words, the central issue how selves are constrained by bodily activities and a biologically embodied self.

The middle section of the book shares a concern for the ways in which bodies are sexed and gendered. These chapters collectively show how the body's sex and gender are implicated in regimes of knowledge and disciplinarity. Elizabeth Wilson examines discourse on computer and cognitive science for clues about the kind of body presumed by these approaches. Her critical analysis of the writings on the Turing test and Atkinson and Shiffrin's now classic, but outdated, model of memory leads to Derrida's notion of the trace and Irigaray's feminist analysis of knowledge. In the end, she inscribes gender onto the seemingly disembodied thinker at the heart of cognitive and computer science. Betty Bayer and Kareen Malone circumscribe feminist discourses on women's embodied subjectivity. While they agree that the body is often central to questions of knowledge, and key to questions about control and normality in women's lives, through a Lacanian slight of hand, they conclude that "the body is never as univocal as psychology and the western epistemologies it recapitulates would have it" (p. 115). In response, they begin sketching alternatives to dominant discourses about women's bodies. Similarly linking bodies and knowledge, Mary Parlee's chapter contrasts academic theories of gendered embodiment (e.g., Harre's theory of corporeal psychology) with transsexual and transgender activists' knowledge. She finds that psychological discourse tends to undermine knowledges "situated within" transsexual and transgender communities and reifies psychology's power by marginalizing these exceptional bodies. Caterina Pizanias uses Bourdieu's notions of field and habitus, modified by feminist and social theories, to explain the censure of a lesbian photographer that challenged boundaries between disciplines. In the process, she makes a case to "think and speak of the body outside disciplinary bounds" (p. 155).

The third section looks at sick and healing bodies. These chapters illustrate how bodies are implicated in how we think about physical health and illness. Cor Baerveldt and Paul Voestermans are critical of social constructionist representations of eating disorders because the body is fabricated as either an inert "mannequin" or the site of political struggle. Instead, they argue that people with anorexia nervosa have a disorder of "selfing," in which the anorexic body is "the embodied expression of a culturally constituted subject" (p. 174). Robert Kugelmann traces the transformation in pain and pain management as biomedical models of pain yield to biopsychosocial models. He asserts that the gate control theory of pain precipitated a revolution in both the meaning of pain and of being a patient, such that conceptions of pain became more holistic and treatments more humanistic. The last chapter, by Arthur Frank, is an analytical review of what theorists and researchers from other disciplines are saying about illness and bodies. Frank's main interest is how authors "struggle with the narratives in which embodied self-consciousness expresses itself" (p. 207). Through his review, Frank identifies five key themes in the relation between bodies, knowledge, self, and illness.