- Body Identification
Everything from human sexuality, to morality, to body identification are driven by natural symbols, the S-line instigates arousal though it be Henry Moore sculpture, blood provokes nausea despite being only silver-screen, and consciousness identifies itself in 'its' body, gender, tribe, Middle-Earth, etc.
Body identification is a sort of naturally occurring capitalism. The body is a symbol. A personal body seems to pass very convincingly for the soul.
It is not necessary for someone to identify with the body he or she is 'in', this is pre-conscious construction. Some psychologists speculate that babies do not differentiate between themselves and their mother; someone using LSD may agglutinate other objects around them into their personal body such as a sofa they are seated on; a sports car is an extension of the body, losing it will be as painful as losing an arm and the former car owner will be victim to all sorts of phantom pains; occasionally we touch or brush ourselves and do not recognize it was ourself and are very surprised, etc.
Like a disembodied spirit searching for a body to inhabit... There is a book, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. A man could also mistake a hat for himself, and that wouldn't be a mistake exactly. Sense of presence is projected. This identification with a body is so powerful and total that when a child falls they look around at the faces of anyone who might have seen to decide if they are hurt or not and should cry -- and feel pain; the hypnotized will drop a metal bar they are told is becoming hotter and will actually feel the burn in their hand; schizophrenics can perceive that they are willing the wind to blow and the leaves to rustle; if someone scratches the paint of Mr. Porsche, he actually feels that as pain just like if someone keyed the breast and belly of a human-body orientated person. Just like we say that if someone dies in her dream she really dies, if the Porsche is destroyed Mr. Porsche can not survive, his human body becomes catatonic unless he can leap his now disembodied soul to a new object.
Someone today would identify with the looks of their face as it appears in a mirror or on a photo-ID card. But these are recent inventions. The looks of someone's face would never have been part of someone's ego-identity which today we so naturally assume.
An ego is essentially a desire. This is its history both in the primitive sense of a communal ego and a communal body that feeds itself and administrates itself, or, in the more alienated modern sense where ego is function driven, a process, and ego exhausts itself in it's futile endless goals.
Body identification is an egoism. The vanity of the flesh has been warned about since the ancientest days. Investiture of the ego in the personal body is the same sort of conspicuous possession as Mr. Porsche.
Empathy is only possible by ego-identifying with another body. The mechanisms of ego-identification with a body are the same no mater which body that is, it could be the one nature seems to suggest, AKA "my body", but in times of altruism, as when a mother bear faces annihilation for her cubs, we can see that she has projected her ego, identity, care, into the bodies of her cubs.
Ego is a memetic virus. Ego represents alienation from nature and from community. All egos are equally pathological no matter of what scale or 'whose'. Deconstruction of the body-identity assumption may be an important step in the post-individualist revolution.
