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live. 112 What is most important in this way of thinking is that the heart and mind define the human
person, while the physical body provides a context through which the person lives his or her day to day
life. People live through their bodies, but do not reduce to their bodies. Therefore, when incongruence
arises between the mind and the body, the mental image of oneself takes priority, because “who we are
is the story we tell about ourselves.” 113 In privileging “felt” experience above the actual contours of the
physical body, the concept of body schema necessitates an instrumentalist view of the human body.
Gayle Salamon, to the contrary, argues that the body schema does not simply reduce to a
mental image of oneself. The body schema does not merely impose one’s desires over the actual
contours of the physical body. Cleverly, Salamon begins her argument from the principle of relationality,
which states that the human person is a relation prior to, or even contrary to, being a substance. Human
beings, then, are not their bodies. To the contrary, a human being possesses a body through which he or
she interacts with other human beings. Even embodiment gains its meaning and significance from
relationality. How? She invokes the philosopher Merleau-Ponty’s concept of sexual schema to make a
point about the intersubjectivity of embodiment. 114 It must be noted, however, that the concept of
sexual schema as presented by Salamon is her reading of Merleau-Ponty; specifically, Salamon
recognizes ambiguities present in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception as philosophically
useful for the notion of body schema. Salamon’s reading of sexual schema presents it as a sexual self
established from the sexual history of a person (sexual actions confined to the past) and sexual desire
(intentions and hopes for the future). 115 These sexual relations define the human person in the present,
and reveal the relational nature of the human person. This sexual self emerges necessarily from an
encounter with another, or others. This encounter with the other(s) solidifies my own existence as a
being brought into being by the desire and love of the other, just as my desire and love bring the other
into existence. 116
Salamon invokes the sexual schema as a way to re-imagine the significance of the sexual
difference between males and females and the desires at the heart of the body schema. “Desire”, she
writes, “in its….physical sense is embodied but – importantly – not located.” 117 This idea implies a
rejection of the idea that functional concepts in the physical body inhere to particular features or bodily
structures. The body’s actual contours do not necessitate functional ri