Customer Reviews

Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking

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I'm not interested in most of Thomas Hanna's books. But this is a clear exception. It is one of those books that through reference to many of the great thinkers, can cause a young adult to question one's view of the world and have the realization that a lot of the important questions of life have been addressed by some brilliant men. This book shook me up in a positive way when I read it at 17. (John Fowles wrote a similar book of aphorisms titled "The Aristos."The Aristos I purchased this copy for my son.

I had high expectations for this book but have major buyer's remorse. The writing is new-agish, pop psychology and philosophy for dummies in style and content. I think some people should stick to writing up case studies and leave theory to others. Hanna seems to have been one of them.

Hanna's approach is general and impressionistic and he makes statements that should raise eyebrows, such as that Kant is a somatic thinker (apparently), and that that Merleau-Ponty is mainly concerned with consciousness. If you read the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that Kant is concerned with consciousness and is therefore not a somatic thinker but an intellectualist, whereas Merleau-Ponty himself is a somatic thinker precisely to the extent that he is concerned with the body and therefore not with consciousness, if in all these expressions 'consciousness' is understood as meaning 'conceptual thought'.

Since there isn't much detail it is hard to say what he means. You get only a vague impression of what he understands by 'the soma' or 'somatic thinking', which seems to be something like 'the organism'. You might get some general sense of who Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Piaget, Reich, etc. were if you did not already know.

Perhaps the most informative chapter is on Reich. While Hanna ignores Reich's politics, his description here comes closest to identifying what he means by the 'soma', and anticipates his later development. It shows how far Hanna's own thinking is influenced by Reich. Later on he is critical of Reichian therapy, but here it is clearer that in fact Reich is a source for him, in particular, the idea of expansion and contraction which he develops in "The Body of Life".

But it also shows that for Hanna, the soma seems to be primarily the organism, and "somatic scientists" are those dealing with the organism, like Lorenz, or more generally systems thinkers. His reductionism or biologism seems inconsistent with Merleau-Ponty who stressed that "every action has a meaning" or even a lot of the psychoanalysis, ethology and philosophy that he discusses: he sees continuities where even ethologists would see discontinuities as in the fact that man has culture.

Some other chapters discuss the biological and anthropological background that Hanna thinks is relevant to somatics. Primitive man is more sensitive, etc. ... so does that mean that we're evolving or devolving? ... sort of like the hippies who must be the proto-mutants one must presume ... right after admiring the culturally superior Germans migrating into American universities making them in turn great. It would follow that the hippie is higher on the evolutionary scale than the German intellectual, and the primitive man is higher still.

The style of writing is new-ageish optimism one moment, pop psychology or philosophy for dummies the next. It is generally upbeat and optimistic about the prospects of an evolution of humankind from traditionalists of the previous generation to the emerging generations of proto-mutants (they're all mutating on Facebook now). There is a sense that there is a revolution, that we have arrived and our problems are now soluble if only we apply somatic thinking to education (not much detail here either), sexuality, etc. Clearly this rang true in 1970, but it is less clear now that the gospel of somatics is transforming human consciousness. The details are yet to be worked out.

For the novice there are better places to go than this. There is also little (apart from what I mentioned above, and maybe a few more bits if you want to plough through the painful prose searching for gems) here for anyone looking for philosophical or psychological background to somatics. Good to skim through if you find it collecting dust on the bookshelf of an ex-hippie.