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Rich material as to the human behavior and experience related to the body has been brought forward by psychology and psychopathology during the last decades. These new conceptions are generally called ‘phenomenological’, and many of them have, indeed been influenced by phenomenological philosophers, like the earlier Sartre and like Merleau-Ponty. Others, like P. Schilder and Erwin Strauss have developed very penetrating analyses along their own lines and even before the aforementioned thinkers had evolved their ideas. The influence of Husserl on the greater part of this current is undeniable, but is nevertheless restricted to the direct or indirect influence of his general phenomenological approach. Many of his thoughts on the body are worked out only in his later works, and where they are found already in earlier writings, such as in the second volume of his Ideas, they remained unpublished. Ideas, II was published only in 1952, many years after Husserl’s death. It is useful, therefore, to analyse now Husserl’s analyses of the body and their importance for Husserl’s concept of a transcendental phenomenology, and to draw some lines of comparison with contemporary results of biological and physiological research.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-010-3326-8_7

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