Il dolore dell'"arto fantasma" e la medicina dell'unione mente-corpo. Sulla teoria cartesiana del corpo proprio

The Medical Renaissance tradition has often referred to phantom limb pain as a very difficult clinical case to explain. In the Sixth Meditation Descartes presents the case of phantom limbs to illustrate to what extent the senses are sometimes deceptive: which theory of mind-body union might best explain this paradoxical experience? Descartes claims that the Platonic model of the union of mind and body is not able to explain pain in particular and human sensations in general. Only the postulate of a «very close union» can clarify the action of the organs of «my body» on the incorporeal mind. The brain and the nervous system played a crucial role in Descartes’ psycho-physical account of the embodied nature of human mind: they are involved not only in sensation, imagination, memory and in the causation of bodily movements, but also in the account of illusions and the paradoxical perception of the phantom limb.