The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture: The Cadaver, the Memorial Body, and the Recovery of Lived Experience

This book examines how modern medicine's mechanistic conception of the body has become a defense mechanism to cope with death anxiety. Robbins draws from research on the phenomenology of the body, the history of cadaver dissection, and empirical research in terror management theory to highlight how medical culture operates as an agent which promotes anesthetic consciousness as a habit of perception. In short, modern medicine's comportment toward the cadaver promotes the suppression of the memory of the person who donated their body. This suppression of the memorial body comes at the price of concealing the lived, experiential body of patients in medical practice. Robbins argues that this style of coping has influenced Western culture and has helped to foster maladaptive patterns of perception associated with experiential avoidance, diminished empathy, death denial, and the dysregulation of emotion. Brent Dean Robbins is Chair and Associate Professor of Psychology at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. He is former President of the Society for Humanistic Psychology, Division 32 of the American Psychological Association. 1. The Medicalized Body and Anesthetic Culture 2. Confronting the Cadaver: The Denial of Death in Modern Medicine 3. Time and Efficiency in the Age of Calculative Rationality: A Metabletic Entry Point 4. The Zombie Body of Linear Perspective Vision 5. Applications of Terror Management Theory 6. Terror Management in Medical Culture 7. Dehumanization in Modern Medicine and Science 8. Objectification of the Body as a Terror Management Defense 9. The Objectification of Women and Nature 10. The Role of the Medical Cadaver in the Genesis of Enlightenment-Era Science and Technology 11. A Theological Context 12. The Changing Nature of the Cadaver 13. Anesthetic Culture 14. Psychiatry's Collusion with Anesthetic Culture 15. Mindfulness-the Way of the Heart