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‘Taking as his starting point the unitary nature of the healthy human being, he shows how, in disease, the individual suffers a disruption in his experience of his body and his world. Such disturbance may be reflected in ocular and visual disorders.’ To this quotation, from the cover, I must add the second half of the author's theme which is not quite so explicitly stated: that ‘the disruption in his experience of his body and his world’ is not likely to be furthered by the orthodox medical orientation which splits the body from the person; that is, the body is treated as an object and the person is disembodied. In this, the influence of R. D. Laing, who is the editor of the series, will be evident, and the author expresses considerable indebtedness to Laing for introducing him to phenomenology.
In line with this introduction, it seems that the author's main aim is to bring a wholeness to the medical view of disease, by integrating it with a phenomenological approach to the world of the ill person. To this end much space is devoted to a systematic study of eye diseases and their phenomenological backgrounds. I find the book interesting and my views of eye diseases enlarged, but the attempt at integration a failure. I can indicate the nature of this failure by drawing attention to a central conception which runs through the book. I refer to the distinction between the ‘visual world’ and the ‘visual field’, a distinction originally made by J. J. Gibson in his book The visual world which revolutionized thinking about visual perception. The visual world is the solid and continuous world of real objects which we live in; in which objects have a continuity and identity, despite manifold changes occurring in their perceptual images, and despite the fact that an object, or part of an object, may be outside the field of vision at a particular time.
In contrast we perceive the visual field by separating ourselves from our perceptions and looking at them, as is typified by the f