David Le Breton is a sensitive researcher who delves into the theme of the body from the human dimension. He quickly places the direction of his research for this book at the beginning by stating: "The human condition is a bodily condition." This affirmation places us in a context that Le Breton develops throughout his extensive work: the importance of the meaning that is attributed to this bodily condition framed in the parameters of temporality, since the body, and therefore the person, it has an innate fragility and a limited duration; and the separation from others, marked by the singularity of the body and by its isolation within the edges of the skin, although it can access touch and contact. This investment, sometimes unsuccessful, occurs in a social bond, in a swarm of meaning agreements in relation to the actions and reactions of the body and what emanates from it. Agreements as to what should be controlled because it is considered invasive or in bad taste, agreements on what is expected of each body at each age, agreements on beauty, health, social belonging or even the body schema. Agreements that are not always made explicit and, most of the time, not understood by those who, like elephants in a bazaar, break social conventions by having a developing body, a disabled body, an aged body or, simply, a body that is express spontaneously.

Le Breton investigates the gap between the body and the psyche, between the individual and society, between pain and suffering, between ability and disability, between adolescents and adults, between ancient and contemporary societies, finding there a fertile field of investigation and production of hypotheses about how the body is invested in different situations and also how it is disenvested in situations of transition or passage, or in situations of rupture, such as in cases of sexual abuse or limiting illnesses.

We can think that the moments of transition of the body are continuous, because the body changes with the weather, with age, with its continuous adaptation to the environment, thus changing our vital possibilities and our relationship with it. But, -and here what is interesting about the proposal made by Le Breton in his different texts included in this volume-, is the sense that we give to the different historical moments of our body, to the different situations of health or disease, to the appearance of our body and how it relates to the world, which can transform these passages into suffering or pain, into growth crises or mere illness, living the body as one's own and integrated into itself, or as an other alien to which we are tied to our regret.

Perhaps contemporary societies need modern shamans to facilitate these transitions. Modern societies, as Le Breton explains, do not have ritualized these passages, they do not accompany these changes in life signaling the way to locate the meaning, therefore, especially young people, must create their own rites of passage to the adulthood, seeking marks that identify them, that help them appropriate their bodies that have acquired new capacities with development, and that they still cannot understand.

“Any bodily pain is simultaneously suffering”, says Le Breton at the beginning of the book, settling the dichotomy between body and psyche, between physical pain and what it means for the actor who suffers it. The human dimension is a dimension of meaning, and it is through meaning that we decode what we feel. This is how we build our reality.

Society also constructs reality from what it states as correct or good, as normal or healthy, establishing meanings that mark a trend in the flow of social meaning, creating a "common sense", generally exclusive and functional to certain thoughts. politicians. This standardized social sense leaves out those who cannot be included within these norms, either for reasons related to their specific conditions of existence, their physical limitations, their age, or by mere desire. Thus, disabled people are excluded who, as Le Breton points out in the chapter dedicated to the subject, are victims of a double discourse, where they are textually accepted, but bodily rejected, since they arouse concern and comments because they arouse fear of the unknown. Adolescents, whose bodies full of sexual potency are not even understood by themselves, are excluded. People who suffered rape or sexual abuse are excluded because, in order to appropriate a body that has been taken from them and causes them suffering, they often resort to cutting themselves because "The cut is an incision of the real, it immediately gives the subject a root in the thickness of its existence.” Everyone is excluded