身体意象是指一个人心目中对自己身体的美学。所有时代的人类社会对人体美学寄予了很大的价值，但一个人对自己身体的认知可能不符合社会的标准。身体意象的概念应用在许多学科，包括心理学、医学、精神病学、精神分析学、哲学、文化和女性主义研究。这个词虽然经常在媒体出现，但相关的学科和媒体也没有对定义达成共识。在心理学中，它往往包括一个人对自己身体的看法、信念和情感态度，这个概念是用来讨论各种疾病和障碍，如神经性厌食症、其他饮食失调、身体变形症（BDD）、身体完整认知失调（BIID）和各种中风后的状态。身体意象问题也在精神病如精神分裂症和虚无妄想综合征（Cotard delusion）中显现出来。身体意象经常与身体图式（Body schema）混淆，后者涉及控制姿势和动作。

Body schema is a concept used in several disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, sports medicine, and robotics. The neurologist Sir Henry Head originally defined it as a postural model of the body that actively organizes and modifies 'the impressions produced by incoming sensory impulses in such a way that the final sensation of [body] position, or of locality, rises into consciousness charged with a relation to something that has happened before'. As a postural model that keeps track of limb position, it plays an important role in control of action. It involves aspects of both central (brain processes) and peripheral (sensory, proprioceptive) systems. Thus, a body schema can be considered the collection of processes that registers the posture of one's body parts in space. The schema is updated during body movement. This is typically a non-conscious process, and is used primarily for spatial organization of action. It is therefore a pragmatic representation of the body’s spatial properties, which includes the length of limbs and limb segments, their arrangement, the configuration of the segments in space, and the shape of the body surface. Body schema also plays an important role in the integration and use of tools by humans.