77

As it is commonly understood, the body is solely in the domain of physiology. And yet it is profoundly human, in the sense that it is controlled by processes where man alone determines the principle. This way, the body becomes integrated into society: it is taken over and educated, coming under highly diverse usages, that ethnology and sociology never stop reporting. The body is also faced with ethics: subject to a specifically human problem in seeking satisfaction, an area specifically covered by psychoanalysis, it is marked by the special demands that this quest implies. It is also spoken, or thought out, and produced, that is, technically shaped. In other words, the body, insomuch as it is distinct from the organism, is covered by all of the human sciences that serve to report the specific determinisms at work in humanity. To understand the true scope of the analyses that these sciences set out, it is however necessary to break with the well-known dichotomy in vision, of body and mind, and to substitute for this a dialectical conception of their relationship as put forward in the mediation theory expounded by Jean Gagnepain.