Unsettling Care: Intersubjective Embodiment in MBCT

Abstract

Focusing on the place of “embodiment” for therapists in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, this paper reveals that care often requires an on-going commitment to “being with” forms of uncomfortable self-experience. This work challenges the valorization of caregiving (as “natural,” “good,” or “rewarding”) in anthropology by revealing the unsettled nature of lived experience, replete with difficult and changeable affective relations. Care emerges as a necessarily unsettled practice.