Aesthetic Experience and Healing: The Secret of “Therapeutic” Images

Territories in Question: Routes in Territories
By Margitta Zimmermann
English

What is an “aesthetic experience” in the context of illness? How to understand gestures and behaviors of those persons who, during their illness, hang up the picture of their internal body on the walls of their home? This is not “individual extravagance” on their part, but a rearticulation of the relationship between “body” and identity in the context of suffering. The radiographic picture thus induces in them an implicit identitary reconstruction, since it can influence not only their way of “thinking,” but also their way of “feeling” about the body and, hence, about the self by using the senses to immunize perceptions and emotions in their real and intimate world.

Keywords

  • radiography
  • aesthetic experience
  • body
  • affects
  • ethnography
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