Reconnecting with the Lived Body: What Sartre Can Teach Us About Pain

When we think about pain, we often picture nerves, muscles, and joints. But there’s another dimension to pain — one that involves our sense of self, our awareness of the body, and how we live inside it.

This deeper layer of embodiment was explored long before neuroscience, by the French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his 1943 classic Being and Nothingness. And surprisingly, his ideas are now finding echoes in modern pain science.

🧠 The Lived Body vs. the Observed Body

In Being and Nothingness (p. 310ff), Sartre explains that we experience our body in two ways:

1. The body as an object — the physical structure that others can see, measure, or treat.

2. The body as lived — the body we feel from within, through sensation, movement, and awareness.

He calls this second perspective the body-for-itself (corps-pour-soi). It’s how we exist through our body, not as something separate from it.

When we move freely, feel connected, and sense our body’s rhythm, we live mainly in this body-for-itself state. But when pain, trauma, or fear arise, we often shift into seeing our body as an object — something that has gone wrong or is working against us.

💫 Pain and the Fragmented Sense of Self

Modern neuroscience confirms what Sartre intuited: pain doesn’t only change our tissues — it changes how our brain represents the body. In chronic pain conditions such as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), fibromyalgia, or phantom limb pain, people often report that their body feels foreign, distorted, or disconnected.

Neuroimaging studies (Moseley, 2011; Bufacchi et al., 2020) show that the brain’s “map” of the affected area in the somatosensory cortex becomes blurred — a process known as cortical smudging. The result? A lived experience of alienation from one’s own body, much like what Sartre described philosophically decades ago.

“I do not have my body as an object; I am my body.” — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1957, p. 310)

🌿 The Flow Clinic Perspective: Re-inhabiting the Body

At The Flow Clinic, we see chronic pain not just as a biomedical issue, but as a disruption in the relationship between body, brain, and self-awareness. Our goal is to help clients reconnect with their lived body — the body-for-itself — through gentle, neuro-informed interventions that rebuild safety and presence.

We use:

• Manual therapy and movement to restore sensory clarity and proprioception.

  
  

• Breathwork and interoceptive awareness to calm the autonomic system.

  
  

• Guided education and mindfulness to reduce fear and restore body ownership.

This approach helps shift the experience of pain from objectified suffering back to embodied connection — allowing healing to emerge from within.

🔬 Modern Connections Between Philosophy and Neuroscience

• Sartre’s body-for-itself aligns with modern ideas of embodiment and interoception — how we sense internal bodily states.

  
  

• Pain neuroscience now recognises that the sense of ownership over one’s body is plastic and trainable.

  
  

• Rebuilding this sense of ownership through movement, touch, and awareness can reduce pain intensity and improve function, as supported by neurorehabilitation research.

In other words, the bridge between existential philosophy and clinical neuroscience is growing stronger — both describe the same truth from different angles:

Healing happens when we come back home to our body.

✨ Takeaway

Pain can make us feel trapped, cut off, or estranged from our body — but these experiences are not permanent.

Through awareness, movement, and safe reconnection, we can rediscover what Sartre called the lived body — and move toward ease, agency, and flow once again.

📚 References

• Sartre, J.-P. (1957). Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library.

• Moseley, G. L. (2011). Body Illusions in Health and Disease. Oxford University Press.

• Bufacchi, R. J. et al. (2020). Pain outside the body: defensive peripersonal space deformation in trigeminal neuralgia. Nature Scientific Reports, 7, 12487.