legs
The Seba library treats Leg in 7 passages, across 6 authors (including Sacks, Oliver, Coleman, Graham, Fogel, Alan).
He had somehow contrived to fall out of bed, and was now sitting on the floor, carrying on and vociferating, and refusing to go back to bed. Could I come, please… I found the patient lying on the floor by his bed and staring at one leg.
Sacks presents the leg as the site of neuropsychological alienation, where the patient’s refusal to claim the limb as his own dramatizes the collapse of body-image identity.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985thesis
The extended right leg and foot symbolises the abandonment of all negative defects, and the drawn in left leg symbolises the deity’s understanding and cultivation of all positive attributes.
Tibetan iconographic tradition encodes a complete somatic-spiritual hermeneutic in the position of each leg, rendering the limb a precise symbol of discriminative awareness and the abandonment of extremes.
, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Penguin Classics), 2005thesis
It seemed as though Sandy was counting on her right leg for assistance, not putting much weight on the left leg, and not trusting that leg to hold her.
Fogel reads the uneven weight distribution between legs as a somatic record of post-traumatic distrust, the body’s refusal to rely on a previously injured support.
, Body Sense: The Science and Practice of Embodied Self-Awareness, 2009thesis
This three-legged horse doesn’t feel like good news when we see it standing there… Three, on the other hand, falls a little short… something important is gone.
Bly interprets the three-legged horse mythopoetically as an image of psychic incompleteness, the missing fourth leg signifying an undeveloped or absent dimension of masculine wholeness.
, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990thesis
You’ve got this miserable, swollen, ulcerated leg and foot — red, hot and painful. You have to drag yourself to the emergency every day for IV antibiotics. You have HIV. And you won’t give up injecting speed.
Maté uses the destroyed leg of an addict as a clinical image of dissociation from embodied consequence, where compulsion overrides even the most visceral somatic suffering.
, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction, 2008supporting
such ‘body-image’ disorders — the term was only introduced (by Henry Head) fifty years later — might be influenced either by central factors… or peripheral ones (the condition of the nerve-stump, or neuromas; nerve-damage, nerve-block or nerve-stimulation).
Sacks situates phantom-limb and body-image disorders within a dual-factor model, grounding the psychological experience of missing limbs in both cortical and peripheral physiological determinants.
, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 1985supporting
I come to you, sought with many prayers… worthy of respect also to the immortal gods is the man who arrives after long wandering, as I now do at your stream and your knees after much suffering.
Benveniste’s analysis of the supplication gesture — reaching the knees — gestures toward the symbolic significance of the lower limb as a site of petition, power, and corporeal contact in Indo-European ritual.
, Indo European Language and Society, 1973aside