Some thoughts between body and mind in the light of Wilma Bucci’s multiple code theory

Abstract

The author proposes the usefulness of Wilma Bucci’s Multiple Code Theory in clarifying some controversial issues in psychoanalytically inspired psychosomatics. Definition of a dialectic among different entities may appear difficult in an unitarian view of the organism, where body and mind are seen as having no kind of intrinsic existence, which may be differentiated from the organism as a whole, but as two categories having to do with the perspective of the observer. This aporia may find a solution in a redefinition of the body–mind relationship as that between symbolic systems and the subsymbolic system, both of which may be viewed as mind or as body depending on the point of observation. Similarly, somatic pathology, if we accept an unitary paradigm, need no longer be viewed as due to an influence of ‘mind’ on ‘body’: a definition of pathology as linked to a disconnection between different systems, as found in Bucci’s theory, is proposed as a possible solution. Emergence of somatic symptoms, however, besides being witness to disconnection, may be seen as the subsymbolic first expression of an item of content, an attempt at reconnection, as already proposed, in a way, by Winnicott in 1949. This attempt has much better opportunities to succeed when it finds an adequate container, as in analysis. A clinical situation of this kind is presented.

Key words:

• body–mind
• Bucci
• multiple code theory
• nonverbal
• psychosomatics
• subsymbolic

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Wilma Bucci herself for sharing and discussing her ideas with me on several occasions; the Centro di Psicoanalisi Romano (Section of Italian Psychoanalytic Society) and, specifically, Giuseppe Moccia, Scientific Secretary at the time, for organizing a Workshop with Wilma Bucci in 2007, where this paper began to take form; the study group ‘Towards body–mind unity’ of the Centro di Psicoanalisi Romano, coordinated by Carla De Toffoli,¹² where several ideas on the body–mind relationship contained in this paper were developed; Gina Atkinson for her careful and thoughtful linguistic revision of the manuscript; and Maria Vittoria Costantini for her precious comments and suggestions on the final revision of the manuscript.

Notes

1. Engel (1977) defined dogmatic reductionism as the effort to trace all phenomena back to one level that is considered basic. In this case, it means tracing any organismic function, mental functions included, back to material operations, be they mechanical, biological, chemical or molecular. It is so defined in opposition to methodological reductionism, which simply consists in reducing the field of observation to a certain level (e.g. what can be seen in cells through the use of a light microscope; what a clinician can see in assessing interactions in a family), without denying existence of other levels.

2. Authors attributed these effects of early separation from mothers mainly to loss of affective contact. More recent studies (Hofer, 1984, 1987, 1996) demonstrated, however, that, though affective contact remains undeniably important, direct biological effects are induced also by physical contacts, which in the natural reality of the relationship with the primary caretaker are intertwined with affective ones. Thus, maternal stroking induces the production of growth hormone, while rocking induces maturation of the vestibular apparatus.

3. I thought I had found an original way to express this position when I discovered in a recent volume by Grotstein (2008) that Bion had already used this phrasing, in the Italian Seminars: “I think that the patient whom you see tomorrow is one, a whole, a complete person. And although we say – obeying the laws of grammar – that we can observe his body and mind, in fact there is no such thing as a ‘body and mind’; there is ‘he’ or a ‘she’” (Bion, 2005, p. 38).

4. Naturally, it is impossible to briefly summarize the thinking of an author who wrote thousands of pages over a 30-year period. I shall refer to Bion’s ideas essentially as they are used by most analysts today in discussions and scientific works.

5. Only recently, I became aware of a proposal (Hautmann 2002, 2005) that thought and transformation activity can be present also at the level of beta elements.

6. Luisa Zoppi (2006), a Jungian psychoanalyst, suggested a similarity between the subsymbolic system and Jung’s concept of psychoid.

7. Physiological correlates of functions attributed to the three systems may be found in large sectors of the neuroscientific literature (see e.g. Becara et al., 1995; Schore, 1994)

8. The notion of organs as fixed precipitates of experience is proposed in a paper by Daniels (1936).

9. This is one of Freud’s sublime contradictions, nonchalantly proposed when he tries to describe nonlinear phenomena in the language of linear causality, which was the only language available to him at the time. Concepts such as circular causality and bilogic were not available.

10. “Symbols are needed not only in communication with the external world, but also in internal communication. Indeed, it could be asked what is meant when we speak of people being well in touch with their unconscious. It is […] that they have some awareness of their own impulses and feelings […] that they have actual communication with their unconscious phantasies. And this, like any other form of communication, can only be done with the help of symbols. So that in people who are ‘well in touch with themselves’ there is a constant free symbol‐formation […]” (p. 335).

11. The same thing may be said about acting out. Racalbuto (1994, p. 7) wrote: “The unrepresentability was not in the acted out absence; rather, the latter represented … a transformation already accomplished, albeit a minimum one, of the affect‐sensation, an area previously opaque of meaning.”

12. Other current participants are: Alessandro Antonucci, Letizia Barbieri, Ferdinando Benedetti, Anna Bovet, Roberta Di Lascio, Angelo Macchia, Alma Macho, Maura Magnani, M. Adelaide Palmieri, Dimitri Rallis, Luigi Solano and Domenico Timpano.