Intercorporeal Inclusion: Accommodation, Isolation, and “Mental Illness”

When we think of our way of being-in-the-world as an individual rather than as an intercorporeal accomplishment, we unfairly expect other people to sustain for themselves forms of experience that we only sustain through others. Drawing on Lisa Guenther’s work on solitary confinement, Iris Marion Young’s work on extended-care facilities for older adults, and my own account of the experience of people who hear voices, I will explore how we can deny others inclusion in forms of intercorporeality that we take for granted, and thereby exacerbate, if not create, forms of distress often referred to as “mental illness.” Indeed, we often deny forms of intercorporeality to the very people who are often most in need of them, people like prisoners, older adults, and those diagnosed with psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, whose sense of self and autonomy is already more at issue than that of most others. While restoring existing forms of intercorporeality, or even creating new forms, for those who have been denied them may not eliminate the suffering associated with “mental illness,” it may certainly help to lessen this suffering.