The Body Emerging from the “Neverland” of Nothingness

Abstract

The author considers sensory perceptions arising from the body to be the first expressions of self-consciousness and mental existence in patients who are overwhelmed by a dimensionless abyss of nothingness. This perspective can help the analyst in catalyzing the patient’s integration with his deepest levels of mental functioning. Clinical material from the four-session-per-week analysis of a psychotic patient is discussed. To this analysand, finding the body meant finding “the land that never was,” a “land” that could begin to exist in analysis thanks to a relational working through within the analytic couple.

• Body-mind relationship
• psychosis
• working through
• ego
• id
• alpha function
• Bion
• annihilating anxieties
• analytic relationship
• somatic sensations