Embodiment and the Ethic of Compassion in Clinical Forensics

• In Event: The Colors of Embodiment and Crime: Toward a Criminal Justice Ethic

Abstract

Building on the continued work of Polizzi & Draper (2013a; 2013b; 2013c; 2014; 2015), we argue that the American Psychological Association and the American Criminological Association, although well-founded and helpful, could be enhanced by re-thinking rational ethics from a frame of embodied compassion. This theory of embodiment arises from Merleau-Ponty, who argues that the body is the first social object, and that the body situates us in-relation to others and the world. Mensch follows Merleau-Ponty’s argument and extends it by demonstrating that the body not only situates us in-relation, it also fundamentally connects us to others. This falls in-line with Heidegger’s being-in-the-world; where we are in relation to the world around us and those situated with us. Our relation to the world informs the phenomenology of experience, knowledge, self, and others. This relationality becomes acute and apparent in psychotherapy within prisons. Often the mentally ill are taken up as objects-of-illness rather than people-with-whom-to-relate. It is through this embodied compassion that we feel things both for and with others, especially the mentally ill in our prison system.

Authors

• Matthew Draper, Utah Valley University

• David Polizzi, Indiana State University

• Elizabeth Snyder, Utah Valley University

• Zakery Estrada, Utah Valley University

• Kevin Glenn, Anasazi Foundation