The Body as Evidence

The body keeps a record that the mind may not have access to. This is among the more significant findings of contemporary trauma research — that physiological responses can persist independently of, and sometimes contrary to, conscious memory. A person may not recall an event in the conventional sense and yet respond to associated stimuli in ways that are clearly adaptive to a past threat.

The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk used this observation as the title of an influential book: The Body Keeps the Score. The phrase has entered general circulation, which is both a testimony to the idea's resonance and a reason for some caution. Popular concepts tend to be simplified in transmission, and this one is no exception.

What the research actually shows is considerably more complex than its popularised version. It suggests that the nervous system encodes information differently depending on the conditions under which it is received. High-arousal states — fear, extreme stress — seem to encode experience in forms that are less accessible to narrative reconstruction than ordinary memory. The result is fragmentation: responses without stories, sensations without contexts.

Therapy approaches derived from this research — somatic therapies, EMDR, certain body-based practices — attempt to work with these non-narrative encodings rather than around them. The evidence for their efficacy is growing, though it is still considerably less robust than their advocates sometimes claim.

What is most interesting, philosophically, about this area of research is what it implies about the relationship between knowledge and consciousness. There appear to be forms of knowledge — encoded in the body's responses — that are not available to reflective awareness. This is a significant complication to any model of the person as a self-transparent, knowing subject.