Miming and Clinical Psychoanalysis: Enhancing Our Intersubjective Sensibility

ABSTRACT

We are deeply convinced that one cannot study the human soul and the human behavior as “a thing,” that a discourse in third person will never equate a discourse in first person, and that not all the human communication is understandable and translatable into conceptual thought. We will illustrate this assumption in a review of research that led us to the particular “technique” of miming after the session, never in the patient’s presence. At the beginning of the clinical case we will explain this technique in some detail. It seemed at first possible and then essential for us to have a therapeutic approach that would facilitate and deepen the communicative experience of two “acting bodies” relating with each other. We called this procedure Mimetic Understanding because the understanding it provides is vastly based on emotions and actions and is less based on conceptual thinking. In the psychoanalytic literature we owe much to Daniel Stern (in particular vitality affects), to Jessica Benjamin’s notion of rhythmic third, and to all the studies of Infant Research that point to rhythm as the first form of meaning (Sander, Stern, Beebe, Knoblauch, and many others).

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• mimesis (miming)
• imitation
• affects and actions
• empathy
• intersubjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Bavela et al. (1986, 1987) have shown that mood sharing led to greater liking (on various measures) in a large series of studies. As predicted, partners who were together for 25 years resembled each other more than random pairs of the same age and than newly wed couples. Partners who have grown to look like each other more may actually be happier together than those who have not, because their resemblance is due to a greater history of shared emotions. And, in general at least, shared emotions lead to a stronger bond between partners (Ap Dijksterhuis, 2005, pp. 211–212).

² The relevant study involved 40 newborn infants with a mean age of 32 hours old. The oldest child in the study was 72 hours old, the youngest was just 42 minutes old at the time of test. The results showed that humans newborns imitate facial acts. (Meltzoff & Moore, 1983, 1989) Newborn imitation provides an “existence proof” for neural mapping between observed and executed movements in human infants. (Meltzoff & Prinz, 2002, p. 23).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gianni Nebbiosi

Gianni Nebbiosi, Ph.D., is President, founding member, supervising and training analyst, of ISIPSÉ (Institute for Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, Italy); founding and Board Member of IARPP (International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy); Member International Council of IAPSP (International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology); Member Editorial Board of the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues; Member Editorial Board of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry; and Corresponding Editor of the journal Contemporary Psychoanalysis.

Susanna Federici

Susanna Federici, Ph.D., is Executive, founding member, supervising and training analyst, of ISIPSÉ (Institute for Self Psychology and Relational Psychoanalysis, Italy); President of IARPP (International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy); and past member International Council of IAPSP (International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology).