Embodiment in Psychology: A Discursive Psychological Approach

The study describes various approaches to embodiment in discursive psychology and introduces related theoretical insights that pertain to the embodied self. The concept of embodiment and its use is characteristically complex in discursive psychology: some researchers highlight the role of macro-discourse and focus primarily on socio-cultural discourse, while for others, phenomena connected to embodiment can be grasped on the level of micro-discourse, on the level of interactions and intersubjective negotiations. Critics of these approaches maintain that the body cannot be explicated in discourse, it has an extra-discursive status. Discursive psychology maintains that embodied experience and the body can be understood as the product of societal discourse or as originated from unmediated interactions. Furthermore, through performativity the body can take an agentive role, and it can become the material vehicle of a socially approved and interpreted sign system. In discursive psychology, research on embodiment is frequently directed to the processes of embodiment as embodied identity or in connection to various aspects of the self.