‘One time my gut and psyche talked to each other’: The flexible use of mind-body dualism to articulate socially situated selves

Abstract

Instead of pursuing the dissolution of mind-body dualism, this article argues for examining when and to what purposes it is mobilised. The article explores notions of the ‘gut’, ‘psyche’ and ‘self’ as mobilised in descriptions of personal experiences, which were examined through collective memory-work with three groups of women. Rather than responding to direct questions about mind-body dualism, participants wrote memories from the prompt One time my gut and psyche talked to each other. . . Our analysis shows that the memories use ‘gut’ and ‘psyche’ to articulate ‘selves’, and these articulations illuminate and help participants navigate the social situations that structure the experiences they describe. More generally, our memory-work shows that meanings of ‘gut’ and ‘psyche’ – and thus implicit ideas about mind-body dualism – are flexible and unsettled. They find their meaning(s) in the ways their relations are articulated, but also via attributions of agency and responsibility. We argue that this is not as such problematic. Rather, our analysis calls for an orientation towards appreciating, rather than fixing or controlling, this mutability. Our memory-work offers and exemplifies such an orientation, and develops the use of memory prompts that provocatively contain the very categories that are in question, rather than trying to avoid their premature articulation or dissolution.