Minding the body: A critical appraisal of three phenomenological accounts of embodiment in social work literature

Abstract

Summary

In the few social work publications dedicated to exploring phenomenological philosophical concepts, embodiment or the lived body, promoted especially by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, seems to have received special attention. Roughly, and according to a phenomenological philosophical perspective, the lived body signifies a mind–body unity that is believed to constitute acts of human perception, including social perception. This article aims to critically appraise three accounts of embodiment in social work literature, focusing on issues of application for the sake of clarifying the value and relevance of applied phenomenology in social work practice. After providing an overview of the reception of phenomenology in the social work literature, and introducing the three cases to be explored and their respective application of Merleau-Ponty's concept of the lived body, the article discusses Merleau-Ponty's own view on phenomenology, followed by a critical discussion of the three cases.

Findings

An applied phenomenology of embodiment turns out to be an ambiguous proposal, while simultaneously posing a challenge to the common-sense notion of professional reflection in face-to-face interaction between professional and client. The value of applying a phenomenology of embodiment to social work practice must arguably correspond to the question of how the lived body of the professional is disclosed reflectively in the encounter with other bodies, rather than simply how professionals adopt a theory to make sense of bodily experience at work.

Applications

This article contributes to clarifying the social situatedness of professional reflection, while also strengthening the case for phenomenological social work by exploring issues of application.

In the few social work publications dedicated to exploring phenomenological philosophical concepts, embodiment or the lived body, promoted especially by phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1945/2002), seems to have received special attention. Roughly, and according to a phenomenological philosophical perspective, the lived body signifies a mind–body unity that is believed to constitute acts of human perception, including social perception. This view emerges clearly in Smeeton and O’Connor's (2020) assessment that embodiment is a central feature of the worker–client relationship in social work practice. Marie L. McCormick (2011) goes so far as to call the lived body an essential dimension of that same relationship. Lastly, Russell Whiting (2021) argues that the phenomenology of intercorporeality may help social work students to pay particular attention to their emotional and embodied interaction with others. Yet, while these accounts together make a strong case for why embodiment should be explored further by social work professionals (as well as by students and researchers), they offer very little insight into how phenomenology, and specifically Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, may be applied in social work practice.

The aim of this article is to critically appraise McCormick's (2011), Smeeton and O’Connor's (2020), and Whiting's (2021) accounts of embodiment, focusing on issues of application for the sake of clarifying the value and relevance of applied phenomenology in social work practice. The value of applying a phenomenology of embodiment in social work practice must arguably correspond to the question of how the lived body of the professional is disclosed reflectively in the encounter with other bodies, rather than simply how professionals adopt a theory to make sense of bodily experiences at work. This article contributes to clarifying the social situatedness of professional reflection, while also strengthening the case for phenomenological social work by exploring fundamental issues of application.

Embodiment in the social work literature

In short, phenomenology can be understood as a loosely bound together philosophical and intellectual movement, initiated at the beginning of the 20th century and, in its modern sense, based around Edmund Husserl's philosophical ideas as well as the critical reception of these ideas by his many students, followers, and critics. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, one could summarize the phenomenological movement by saying that it emphasizes and explores human experience as it relates to human activity (such as thinking), and especially with regard to how this activity is always found to be carried out within a specific social, historical, cultural, and political situation. Put differently, philosophical activity is already situated socio-historically, meaning that its mode of investigation cannot completely escape its own Zeitgeist. Coming to terms with this insight is crucial to the phenomenological movement, especially following Husserl's (1936/1970) final study: The Crisis of European Sciences. Considering that social work literature often stresses the importance of the individual–environment configuration for understanding social needs and how to meet them (Smeeton & O’Connor, 2020), including how social workers are dependent upon the cultural and institutional contexts in which they practice, phenomenology seems like a good fit for social work theory. Yet, if taking the individual–environment configuration one step further, so as to include the phenomenological perspective of the theorizing professional supposed to determine such a configuration or relationship in his or her everyday work, it becomes clear that phenomenological social work implies more than simply explaining the situation of the individual. Instead, phenomenology asks us to radically rethink what it means to be a subject among others in a shared world. In the context of social work practice, this entails, among other things, the disclosure of the transformative potential of the worker–client relationship. Such a transformative potential adds to the orthodox view of the worker–client relationship as a mere instance of transference of provision or social aid in a qualitative sense (e.g., addiction treatment, housing assistance, economical relief, and so on). The idea is that one can seldom expect to change someone's life conditions without hoping to change the person in the process. Sometimes, even, the discovery of and personal conviction in one's own ability to change must come “first.” Given this possible outcome in the interaction between social worker and client, we are here addressing an altogether different kind of social aid, which is the remodeling of social identity (Morén, 2015, pp. 55–56). This process is not unilateral; it is a mutual endeavor in which both the social worker and the client must be willing to invest themselves, of partly reconciling with their existing social roles and, concurrently, actively participating in shaping new ones within the broader human community. Hence, we may propose that phenomenology and (at least some forms of interpersonal) social work both call for a profound exploration of intersubjective experience, and on that basis, further investigation is motivated.

Within the social work literature, it has already been argued that phenomenology may offer a sort of theoretical “reconnection” with an interpersonal dimension of practice that seems to have been obscured by the increasing technicalization of welfare practices; a reconnection leading to a closer understanding of the role and value of the body (Pascoe, 2022), selfhood (Lorenz, 2016), and everyday life, or life-world (Houston, 2014) in face-to-face social work. Yet, one must acknowledge that in-depth discussions of phenomenology and phenomenological concepts in the social work literature are, for the time being at least, limited to a handful of publications. Some scholars do indeed provide more detailed introductions to, for example, Husserl's and/or Martin Heidegger's (e.g., 1927/2008) philosophies as part of their methods sections, but without discussing what the impact of these philosophies themselves may be on social work practice (and research) (e.g., Cornish, 2018; see also Newberry, 2012).

When examining this handful of publications that explicitly discuss the value and relevance of adopting phenomenological concepts in understanding social work practice, it seems that Merleau-Ponty's concept of the lived body is the one most commonly discussed. In a more general outlook, the notion of embodiment appears to be used quite extensively in the social work literature with little or no reference to phenomenology. To provide just a few examples: Muzicant and Peled (2018) show in an ethnographic study on Israeli social workers doing home visits how a corporeal perspective may offer a new understanding on emotional and spatial dimensions of professionals’ experiences of work life. Centering on Swedish elder care, Palle Storm (2018) writes about the role of the body in constructing immigrant masculinities among nurse aides. Elsewhere, in social work research founded on trans and queer theoretical perspectives, the plasticity of the body and body images in identity work has been explored (e.g., Protos, 2021; Smoyer et al., 2021). Why this interest in the concept of the body? The apparent infatuation with the concept of embodiment is understandable, given the sheer tangibility of the concept. The lived body places us—conceptually speaking—at the very heart of the work carried out by social workers and clients. We interact with others through our bodies, solve problems with our bodies, shuffle papers with our bodies, write emails with our bodies, and so on. The body may indeed be viewed as a nexus for social work activities at the micro level.

While phenomenology by no means retains exclusive rights to theorizing about the body, it is with phenomenology that we find the original and most comprehensive theoretical account of the body as viewed from a first-person perspective. Granting the distinction between the German terms Leib and Körper to philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner (e.g., Buytendijk & Plessner, 1925/1982), Husserl (1952/1989) and later Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) developed phenomenological theories of embodiment. Fundamentally, these theories deal with the difference in meaning between the perceived body (i.e., Körper) and the perceiving body (i.e., Lieb) in (self-)perception. For Merleau-Ponty's philosophical purposes, the lived body, as opposed to the perceived body only, that is, in terms of being a mere thing, was a way to express how human experience must be understood from the very outset as perceptual, and in that sense a unification of both body and mind. When considering the human body from the first-person perspective—my own or the bodies of others as experienced by me—we always come across a minded body, the body of someone; and conversely, we find that the mind is always an embodied mind; a perceptual field, as Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) puts it. Our bodies condition our involvement in the world, what enables us to move about in it, to touch, see, and feel objects in our surroundings, but they are also what enables us to think about, abstract, and thematize the world—to grab hold of it, so to speak, as opposed to merely dwelling in it. Viewed historically, the thesis of a mind–body unity came to overturn French philosopher René Descartes’ prior and most influential dualistic approach to the mind and body. As exemplified by his famous principle cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I am), Descartes thought that the separation between mind and body was necessary for establishing a secure rational foundation for philosophy. The mind, conceived as a thinking thing (res cogitans), could, he believed, be kept neatly apart from things extended in space (res extensa), about which knowledge remained uncertain, due to the fallibility of sense experience. Conversely, a phenomenological perspective on the body reminds us that our body is precisely what allows an objective approach to ourselves and the world. Any subsequent objectification—of the perceived body or the things of the world—even in proposing that I exist by way of my thinking alone (as Descartes did), has to follow from the interdependent mind–body relationship in immediate and pre-reflective experience. Before I start philosophizing, I dwell in the world, thus leading Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) to draw his famous conclusion that “I am my body” (p. 231, emphasis added). ¹ What phenomenological reflection makes evident is that I can never exist only as mind, but only as an all-together corporeal existence.

The cases to be explored

The concept of the lived body seems to offer social work theory with a way of concretizing the spatiality of human experience, something that is picked up by McCormick (2011), Smeeton and O’Connor (2020), and Whiting (2021) in their various attempts to apply the phenomenology of embodiment to social work practice. Smeeton and O’Connor (2020) write that:

[a phenomenological] understanding of embodiment, is vital for understanding the roles of both social worker and service user. Bringing embodiment into the frame of reference allows the discourse of social work to consider body in its most visceral and existential nature as one of possibility, movement as well as habitual disposition. In this way, we can account for social work as a visceral phenomenon rather than an abstract one, which invariably leads to an enhanced and nuanced account of how the relation between social worker and service user is a question of engrained embodiment, incorporating pragmatic issues such as fatigue, the lived experience of risk, as well as phenomenological questions about possibilities of mortality and survival. (p. 682, emphasis in original)

Smeeton and O’Connor view the concept of risk as framing a paradigm in British social work practice in late modernity. They argue that an increased concern about risk and risk management in British social work practice has to be understood against the backdrop of a current widespread public mistrust in the ability of professional expertise to solve or mitigate pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges. This has effectively led to a practice organized around the principles of accountability and public protection, rather than risk per se; that is, what it means to experience it. Hence, what is lacking in the sociological account, Smeeton and O’Connor argue, is a thorough reflection on the phenomenon of risk as experienced first-hand by social workers and clients. Their proposal is that, by adopting a phenomenological perspective, social workers will attain a better understanding of the practical and existential conditions underpinning both their own work situation and the life situations of their clients.

In a similar fashion, but within an American context, McCormick's (2011) study centers on how the lived body may be envisaged as an essential dimension of social work practice, as well as a conceptual bridge from the researcher–participant relationship in qualitative research practice to the worker–client relationship in social work practice. Here, McCormick finds an overlap between social work practice and phenomenological human science research in that:

both are relationship-based approaches to knowing; both “emphasize the meaning[s] clients assign” [citing Tosone, 2004, p. 482] to their lived experience of phenomena…. To the extent that the lived body is the essential dimension in the researcher–participant relationship, to that extent it is the essential dimension in the social worker–client encounter. (McCormick, 2011, p. 70)

McCormick's study utilizes empirical interview data as a case for illustrating how the body discloses selfhood in the face-to-face situation between interviewer and interviewee. Yet, and importantly, McCormick here is not only referring to phenomenology in the sense of an empirical research method. As part of her theory section, she also directly engages with Merleau-Ponty's thinking in order to give the reader the full sense of how the lived body may work as a parallel between the researcher–participant and worker–client relationships. “The lived body in phenomenology is not a possession of the ‘self’ it is the ‘self’” (p. 70, emphasis in original), McCormick stresses and cites Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002). At the same time, she argues that “[p]henomenology holds that consciousness of ‘self’ emerges in an interactive process” (McCormick, 2011, p. 70; see also Lorenz, 2016; Smeeton & O’Connor, 2020), meaning that the self is disclosed in and through our interactions with others. And, given that the self is embodied, such relationships among selves are always corporeal, McCormick concludes. In her view, tending to the lived body as an essential dimension may give social workers a better sense of what makes the face-to-face encounter between social worker and client an important and unique form of interaction.

The fact that the self–body relationship is mutually shared by researcher and participant, as well as worker and client, would suggest that an intercorporeal dimension is central to face-to-face social work. Such an approach can be found in Whiting's (2021) account of compassion and intercorporeality in social work practice and education. Whiting seeks to provide a phenomenological language or vocabulary for the benefit of social work students. Such language, grounded in the teachings of phenomenologists Michael Levin and Merleau-Ponty, would enable social workers and social work students to “explain and understand how they can take a compassionate position” (p. 215) in their work. Compassion is something that it is often deemed valuable for social workers to feel toward clients, Whiting observes, and argues that it remains somewhat unclear precisely how compassion is to be endorsed in practice. Whiting defines compassion as a form of openness to others, and this openness can be promoted, according to Whiting, by having social workers explore their intercorporeal relationships with other people (and perhaps especially with clients). Such an exploration may make social workers and social work students more open to sensory “points” of connection that are usually underemphasized, such as sounds and smells, which are usually downplayed in favor of the hegemony of vision (which is also the title of one of Levin's books), according to Whiting. Turning to intercorporeality: “Students are focused on their being in the fullest sense rather than on their doing so if they get a sense of ease in the interaction they should be able to work through how that happened and what it means” (p. 215). Subtle sensory aspects of the worker–client relationship may thus be put into words, and as such, become more valued.

Minding the Lived body—a contradiction?

Whereas McCormick (2011), Smeeton and O’Connor (2020), and Whiting (2021) all engage closely with how Merleau-Ponty's concept of the lived body may reveal different embodied aspects of the worker–client relationship, the phenomenology that is applied in order to expose such aspects is left almost completely unthematized in their articles. As we just saw, Whiting suggests that phenomenology offers a vocabulary for social work students with which they can bring intercorporeality into view, yet fails to consider precisely what a reflective stance taken toward one's own bodily interaction with others might entail. In addition, while McCormick carefully tends to the researcher–participant relationship in phenomenological human science research, her application of the concept of the lived body in social work practice is mainly framed as an approach of being in the moment (an aspect that will be discussed in more detail later [see section “The cases revisited”]); and it remains unclear how such a being relates back to the view of the lived body as a mind–body unity. Lastly, Smeeton and O’Connor touch briefly in their article on how social workers may utilize Husserl's methodological concept of the epoché to bracket their assumptions about clients in order to let the clients’ own meaning-making come into view. Yet, in their argument, this suggested use of the epoché is not explicitly linked to their thesis on embodiment, thus raising questions about the ways in which the epoché itself might be conceived of as an embodied activity. In summary, McCormick, Smeeton and O’Connor, and Whiting all encourage professionals to keep their own bodies in mind during face-to-face interactions, yet without addressing how such guidance aligns with the phenomenological insight of the body as always first lived through in mundane experience before possibly being tended to reflectively.

One way forward could be to resolve what initially appears to be a profound misunderstanding, or even a contradiction, on the part of the cases under consideration. Encouraging professionals to turn their own bodies (or others’ bodies) into a professional aim in their work ends up only corresponding with the view of the body as perceived, as opposed to also encompassing the body as perceiving, that is, an embodied mind. In failing to emphasize this relationship, we would then be back to where we started with the Cartesian dualist approach. Yet, one could also choose to interpret the tension sensed in the cases above as itself being a profoundly phenomenological kind of insight. As we shall see in the next section, this latter interpretation finds support in Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of phenomenological philosophy, as being both an aim (i.e., what) and a practice (i.e., how). Such a philosophical framing may enable more charitable readings of McCormick's, Smeeton and O’Connor's, and Whiting's accounts, as ways to articulate and value the seemingly ambiguous role of the body in face-to-face social work (see section “The cases revisited”).

What is phenomenology?

As part of the preface to Phenomenology of Perception—considered by many to be Merleau-Ponty's most important work as well as a classic in the phenomenological philosophy literature—Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002, p. i) initially poses the question: what is phenomenology? It is clear from the context that he intends to examine the question itself, and what it implies, rather than simply provide an answer to it. In the conclusion to the preface, he writes that phenomenology must, “in so far as it remains faithful to its intention, never [know] where it is going” (p. xxiii). Here, he is referring to the everchanging character of phenomenology, the fact that phenomenology is personal. Elsewhere, he writes: “We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology” (p. viii). Following Merleau-Ponty, the question of what phenomenology is cannot be tackled head-on. One needs first to turn one's attention to how the question is posed. It asks for a what, an object, and thus it assumes that phenomenology can be captured as a thing or substance (e.g., a program, movement, or method). Yet, if we want to understand what phenomenology is about, we cannot approach it solely as a what since that would risk overlooking the fact that phenomenology is first and foremost a practice, something you do (see Ihde, 1986)—a how—as though the everchanging and personal character of phenomenology would become lost in our attempt to say what it is.

Without breaking with Husserl's (1931/1960, 1936/1970, 1982, 1952/1989) phenomenological method, which he acknowledges as the basis for his own phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty points especially to phenomenology as a practice rather than a method. Just as we cannot approach aspects of experience properly without at the same time inquiring into the very act of experiencing them—of perceiving, feeling, and thinking about them—we cannot approach the practice of phenomenology without trying to get at the how of phenomenology, as contrasted to the what. The what is by no means unimportant; after all, things appear as things—but not just as things. They need to acquire the status of thing for the person experiencing them, and we tend to forget this status-for-someone in the course of living our lives: that the people in the streets are seen by me, or that my worries are entertained by my thinking. A more mature understanding of phenomenology, then, is that it seeks to remind us of our acts, of activity, of this utmost personal relationship that we all have with the world (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1964, ch. 3). In so doing, phenomenology becomes a practice of reminding (and rediscovering!); a radical practice that seeks to understand and clarify its own endeavor precisely as a practice.

But this leads to a fundamental problem. If part of what characterizes practice, according to a phenomenological perspective, is that it precedes the separation between subject and object—inner and outer—as an accomplishment of reflection, can phenomenology ever arrive at a complete clarification or self-awareness of itself through reflection? In accordance with Husserl's theory of intentionality, consciousness is intentional; that is, consciousness is “nothing” in itself (to paraphrase Sartre's (1943/1992) phenomenology), but always consciousness of something through acts of consciousness. Still, seeing the tree over there, hearing my friend, or realizing that I am running late to a meeting, as examples of such conscious acts, are not the same as reflecting upon that seeing, hearing or thinking as acts. These experiences, through reflecting about them as constituting (formed by) this or that act, or even reflecting about them as experiences in a general sense, always risks losing touch with these experiences as they are lived through pre-reflectively. So, we see that there is a possible tension between Husserl's descriptive approach and the “lived” how that is to be described—the undeniable sense of being alive that always accompanies me, even when I do not turn my attention to it, how my life is sensed in the “midst” of living it. Following Husserl's (1921/2001) famous dictum: to go back “to the things themselves [Ger: Zu den Sachen selbst]” (p. 178) becomes at once a break with the concrete experiences of which we want to stress the significance. The lived, or quotidian, nature of experience continuously precedes and recedes from our very attempts at describing it. Put differently, because phenomenology deals with describing its own practice, it will always reach back retrospectively as it seeks the sense of the how of experience, but any description will be a description of something that has already come to pass. Moreover, what is known all too well by anyone who is familiar with phenomenological thought is that the description is always a shorthand for the experience being described. In this way, phenomenology always remains in some sense elusive to itself. Still, it would be truly sad to see this ambivalence as a shortcoming. It is rather this very thing that makes phenomenology so fascinating. Phenomenology “fails” in the most illuminating sense to explicate human experience, not only due to history but due to (inter)subjectivity as such, which Merleau-Ponty captures so eloquently by referring to the personal when trying to answer the question of what phenomenology is.

The critical thrust of phenomenology and its inner conflict appear to be two sides of the same coin. Merleau-Ponty's case for why we still ought to take an interest in phenomenology is that it reminds us of the beginnings of science and philosophy in everyday life. Paraphrasing Husserl, Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) writes:

To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is. (pp. ix–x, emphasis in original)

Within Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of phenomenology resides both a great asset and a possible contradiction. As he further writes: “The world is there before any possible analysis of mine” (p. x), and must this starting point not also include phenomenological analysis? Arguably, every schematization—philosophical or scientific—is an abstract and derivative sign-language. However, to hold this against phenomenology would be to miss out on making a greater point, not that phenomenology will provide science with the precision it lacks, but that it can help us to underline the precarious conditions of our shared knowledge.

The ambiguity of the lived body in social work practice

Including a phenomenological philosophical framework in discussions about embodiment in the social work literature calls for a more radical and problematizing take on professional (bodily) reflection. To assume that the concept of the lived body may be applied in the sense of making professionals more mindful about a usually taken-for-granted corporeal layer to interacting with clients, presents at best only one half of a phenomenology of embodiment. It starts from the position of individual minds taking notice of their bodies, without incorporating the complicating insight that such minds must first locate themselves in a corporeal existence, together with others. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002, p. 353) argues that the anonymity of the body in pre-reflective perceptual experience is key to making sense of how there can be other lived bodies besides myself. If I turn to reflect upon the other precisely as other, I may clarify for myself that the body of the other can never be just an object for me, just as my own body cannot (pp. 352–353). My understanding of the body of the other as the other's body can never be understood as simply the result of me thinking-through the situation. Merleau-Ponty writes:

When I turn towards perception, and pass from direct perception to thinking about that perception, I re-enact it, and find at work in my organs of perception a thinking older than myself of which those organs are merely the trace. In the same way I understand the existence of other people. Here again I have only the trace of a consciousness which evades me in its actuality and, when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection. (pp. 351–352, emphasis added)

Such a reflection, which elsewhere has been addressed as a form of empathic reflection (see Englander, 2019; Ratcliffe, 2012), is supposedly what allows me to thematize my own pre-reflective and direct understanding of others (see also Eriksson & Englander, 2017; Zahavi, 2010). According to Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002, p. 353), what an empathic reflection reveals to me is that I first share a life with others, in which my body is anonymous to myself; that is, before my body becomes distinguished from yours by being objectified as such in thought. In summary, Merleau-Ponty supports a non-individualistic take on the problem of other minds, which, akin to other phenomenological accounts given by, for example, Husserl (2006), Max Scheler (1913/2008), Edith Stein (1917/1989), and Alfred Schutz (1932/1967), continues to hold relevance for contemporary discussions on intersubjectivity and empathy in both philosophy and the sciences (see, e.g., Zahavi, 2010).

It is relevant to an applied phenomenology of embodiment in social work that thematization of the lived body cannot be seen as simply an analysis that gets to the true meaning of possessing a body. Rather, the meaning of the lived body is that it is taken for granted in our being-oriented-toward-the-world, and it is such a world orientation that phenomenological reflection helps to lay bare. Applying this insight to professional work and reflection means (among other things) that the body can never fully become a tool in the work with clients. There is an interrelationship between our bodies already taking place at a pre-reflective level before they are separated from each other as things that may be manipulated. Emphasizing the retrospective, temporal structure of reflection may therefore clarify how interpersonal relationships may never be completely subjected to propositional knowing, to saying that is. Reflection in the face-to-face encounter is always a matter of recurrently tuning into (and turning back to) an ongoing resonance between bodies (see Schutz, 1951). This insight, brought to me by reflection signifies an interdependence that I share with other people, how our capacity for controlling our senses (e.g., deliberately focusing on the other's body language to draw conclusions about their temperament, intentions, and thoughts, and supposedly coming to understand them better in order to help them better) is presupposed by a spontaneous bodily responsivity to other people.

The cases revisited

Turning again to the three cases, implicit support can be found for the above proposal concerning bodily reflection as a form of interdependence in the social worker–client relationship. Returning to McCormick (2011, p. 81), and her exploration of the lived experience of the interview situation in phenomenological human science research, she claims that there is a lived bodily dimension to the client–professional relationship that is rendered invisible in case notes and the like. Her claim somewhat parallels the ambiguity of the lived body according to Merleau-Ponty's perspective. As we saw earlier, the body is ambiguous in being both an object and a lived body which allows for that very objectification to take place. Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002, pp. 106–107) argues that, by way of a simple experiment of placing your hands on your own body, you may experience both touching and being touched by shifting the focus of your attention (i.e., double sensation). In Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, this calls upon us to reconsider the very meaning of materiality, a boundary that is usually drawn between mind and body. As Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) famously declared: “the things pass into us as well as we into the things” (p. 123). However, this quote is interpreted differently by McCormick (2011, p. 82), not as a call to question materiality but as a call for the researcher, as well as the social worker, to be in the moment of the face-to-face encounter. After quoting Merleau-Ponty on the temporal structure of bodily experience (i.e., how the experience of my body as an object must necessarily presuppose a mind–body unity), McCormick writes:

This temporality challenges the social work researcher and practitioner to be present with her embodied “self” to the embodied “self” the participant/client has come to share without disembodying her “self” through retreat into cognitive knowing that risks the momentary-ness of “self” disclosure. (p. 82)

Here, McCormick is asking us to be awake in the encounter, to see the self of the other as continuously expressed through our perceptual experience of the other's body, and not something hidden away inside or beyond it, something that we would have to “access” through means of reason and intellect. Yet, would not this being or mindfulness that McCormick advocates be precisely that which turns us away from our lived perceptual experience of the other's bodily expression, and instead toward ourselves and our own bodily conduct? If that were to be the case, the ambiguity between body-as-object and body-as-subject in the phenomenological account would be upheld.

A similar ambiguity surfaces in Whiting's (2021) account, where intercorporeality is portrayed as ubiquitous in the face-to-face encounter, while also being supposedly at stake in professional self-reflection. Instead of asking students to do something in particular, even trying to be in the moment, Whiting argues that acquaintance with the phenomenology of embodiment among students has the potential to make them more receptive to the sensorial level of their interactions with others, a level that they might otherwise take for granted. Whiting argues that intercorporeality is “intrinsic to personal identity” (p. 210), and thus helps to challenge a dualistic view of the worker–client relationship. Here, Whiting is drawing on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Whiting sees a direct value in Merleau-Ponty's critique of Descartes, not only for challenging the duality imposed by viewing the mind as separated from the body, but the duality implied by approaching the worker and client as conceived, from the outset, as two separate individuals. Whiting observes that the individualistic approach needs some form of intermediary in order to make sense of the possibility of social relationships; that the social worker and client has to (intellectually) recognize themselves in one another to share a sense of togetherness. Assuming instead the position of intercorporeality means to acknowledge that we are already intermingled with others through our sensory (i.e., bodily) faculties. Intercorporeality would then play the role of a double-edged sword in social work practice: both as a critical concept with which to challenge an individualistic approach to intersubjectivity, and as a practical tool for promoting sensory sensitivity among students in their future work. Yet, are these two ambitions fully compatible with each other? When Whiting ponders the possibility that intercorporeality may become lost in the worker–client relationship due to inattention, it is unclear whether intercorporeality remains a condition for the relationship, or something to be achieved within it—or both. How can intercorporeality become “lost” if it is always there in the first place? Perhaps reflecting upon past encounters may clarify for social work students and professionals how taken-for-grantedness is not something to simply be overcome in relation to others, but something that must also be acknowledged for constituting social interaction (see Schutz, 1932/1967).

Uncertainty regarding the role of naivety in the encounter between professional and client emerges even more clearly in Smeeton and O’Connor's (2020) consideration of the Husserlian epoché. Husserl (1982) refers to the use of the epoché as a form of methodological operation that is used to put various positings (or assumptions) into brackets or out of play when describing phenomena. Supposedly, the epoché makes it clear that things appear to consciousness precisely as appearances, and not simply as taken-for-granted objects pertaining to a mind-independent reality. In line with his phenomenological method, Husserl believed that various steps of thought, corresponding for example to his so-called reductions and the epoché, were necessary for working toward a rigorous structural account of consciousness, or its pure essence, in philosophy. In the context of social work practice, Smeeton and O’Connor (2020) write that the “[u]se of the epoché allows the social worker to suspend their prior assumptions about what might have happened, what might be the barriers or oppressions that service users face and what we believe the answers to be” (p. 680, emphasis in original). Critical (self-)reflection among professionals is a good thing. Yet, may not social workers already be applying something like an epoché (although in an informal, non-philosophical fashion, of course) when they are examining their assumptions about and in relation to clients? Is it really a skill they need to acquire and deliberately employ? Schutz (1945) favored a view of the Husserlian epoché that is more in line with the first interpretation above, that is, an epoché is not so much a technique as it is a suspension of belief pertaining to a shift of attitude that may occur spontaneously in everyday life. Even though Merleau-Ponty did not take as much interest in the concept of the epoché as Schutz did, he was very much interested in how certain lived experiences could possibly reveal the taken-for-granted structure of everyday life. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1945/2002) often refers to various physical conditions such as Anosognosia and phantom limb syndrome. These conditions, Merleau-Ponty argues, tend to become an issue for the person afflicted by them only when he or she becomes reminded of them; for example, when experiencing pain in a limb that is not in fact there. Experiences of such conditions are significant in Merleau-Ponty's analysis since they, among other things, break down and throw into sharp relief the anonymity of the lived body in pre-reflective life, a lived bodily unity constituting the separation between mind and thing in thought.

Applied phenomenology and professional reflection

To summarize, McCormick's (2011), Smeeton and O’Connor's (2020), and Whiting's (2021) engagements with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment are a welcome addition to an otherwise barely existing debate on phenomenological philosophy in the social work literature. This article has sought to clarify their contributions to an applied phenomenology of embodiment in social work practice, and has found that such a phenomenology articulates the bodily and pre-reflective interdependence in the professional's everyday life with others. But of what value is such an approach, aside from making accommodations for phenomenology as a form of propositional or formal knowledge—a method—for social workers to employ in their work? Arguably, such a view would reproduce the imagery of the inward gaze, where the problem-solving mind works in seclusion from the “outside” world. Instead, following through with the thesis of the embodied mind must mean acknowledging a worldly and existential foundation for professional reflection. Profession researcher Donald Schön (1983) comes close to such an acknowledgment in his distinction between the modes of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Deliberate acts of reflection (i.e., reflection-on-action), where one gets to contemplate what to do next, are rare in the working life of the professional. Instead, a large proportion of professional reflection is related to continuously framing complicated problem settings into more manageable problems (i.e., reflection-in-action), Schön argues.

In accordance with a phenomenological approach, what may be added to the discussion on professional reflection is that acts of reflection surpass even that of finding a footing in a problematic reality. Even more foundationally, what needs to be acknowledged is that professional reflection in the face-to-face encounter depends first and foremost on interpersonal understanding in a we-relationship (see Schutz, 1932/1967). Englander (2014, 2018, 2019) proposes how the pedagogical method of phenomenological empathy training (PET) may facilitate such a reflective focus among students in higher education of the human services. Through means of recording communicative interactions and reflecting on such interactions in a seminar setting, PET affords the opportunity for students to reflectively thematize taken-for-granted meanings in social interaction. The purpose of PET is to further encourage students to adopt an empathic attitude in their future careers as professionals (Englander, 2014). Yet, PET also serves to confront the students with their capacity for empathic perception, necessarily preceding a reflective stance taken toward the other, thus encouraging the students to reappraise some possible preconceptions that they might have about empathizing with clients. As Englander (2019, p. 49) stresses, empathy (in the phenomenological sense) may never be reduced to a communication technique but rather constitutes any such motives playing out within interpersonal relationships. Corresponding with Merleau-Ponty's early views on intersubjectivity, PET offers a pedagogical approach for illustrating the ambiguity of the lived body: that (professional) cognition must be treated, from the outset, as embodied, relying on a pre-reflective and anonymous co-existence with others.

Limitations of the study

As this article has sought to elucidate, the endeavor of phenomenological social work stands to gain from emphasizing the more intricate aspects of phenomenological philosophy at the expense of a more constructive approach. Yet, as we have seen with the case of PET, there are ways to accommodate for these aspects in pedagogical (and supposedly also clinical) settings. Further investigation is needed into how to convey phenomenological philosophical insights on embodiment, specifically, within the context of social work practice and education. The present study can be regarded as an initial step in this direction. Furthermore, a broader discussion on the concept of embodiment, including feminist, queer, and post-structural accounts (see Salamon, 2010), would possibly both enrich and challenge the findings of the study.

Concluding remarks

The technicalization of social work practice due to the implementation of new public management and neoliberal policies and trends has previously been understood in its tendency to objectivize human interaction through measurement (e.g., Higgins, 2015; Hjärpe, 2020; Martinell Barfoed, 2016; Pascoe, 2022), thereby obscuring professional values that are notoriously difficult to capture in numbers; for example, empathy (Bornemark, 2020). Given such expectations of a disembodied kind of practice, where the body is at risk of being treated as just another tool in the social worker toolbox (cf. Pascoe, 2022), Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment offers highly relevant input to the discussion. Yet, rather than presenting a solution to present challenges, phenomenology provides a critical perspective which embraces the difficulties and dilemmas surrounding the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity (Eriksson, 2023). Such becomes a sort of refusal of a simplistic view of knowledge application in contemporary epistemological discourse, for instance, when the notion of subjectivity is reduced to personal bias in the way of truth (see Lorenz, 2016). The phenomenology of embodiment challenges us to recognize that we only ever find ourselves existing in relation to others, and then neither as a pure subject nor a pure object but ambiguously positioned between these extremes. Embracing such an uncertain yet nuanced understanding of ourselves may reinvigorate our sense of commitment to others who share our vulnerable condition: we all are bodies exposed to the world.