Intersubjectivity and psychopathology: Borderline and psychosomatic bodies “at the mind’s limits”

Abstract

The body is the essential go-between between selfhood and otherness, and the site of the implicit traces of intersubjectivity that have marked the brain as well as the body. The body is also the depository of epigenetically implicit traces, sorts of implicit working models. The body is finally the site of the un/conscious, in the sense of implicit memory, something that is not conscious but guides implicitly, namely without our full awareness, behaviors, motivations, feelings, and responses.

In psychopathology, only interpersonal traumatizations or “trauma of human agency” in its three levels causes dissociation in humans. At the mind’s limits, the body/mind disconnection that characterizes psychopathology, as in borderline personality disorders, is also evident in psychosomatic disorders, where the circuit between what the body feels, what the mind registers, and what the subject can name or is able to express verbally is disconnected and, as a result, bodily symptoms come forth in order to name the emotional pain. While hysterical symptoms still retain a symbolic root suitable for interpretation (retaining a metaphoric link between mind and body), psychomatic disorders show that the connection between body and mind has been severed and the symptoms speak “at the mind’s limits.”

Key words:

• intersubjectivity
• psychopathology
• borderline bodies
• psychosomatic disorders
• personality disorders

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Dr. Andrea Scalabrini for his help in the final revision of the manuscript.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clara Mucci

Clara Mucci (PhD Emory University, Comparative Literature, Atlanta, USA; Dottorato di ricerca, Anglistica, Università di Genova) is full professor of dynamic psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy, after having served as full professor of English literature and Shakespearean drama until 2012 and later as full professor of clinical psychology at the University of Chieti, Italy. She is an associate member of the Società Italiana Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica (SIPP), a psychoanalyst with training functions for the Società Italiana Psicoanalisi e Psicoterapia- Sandor Ferenczi (SIPeP-SF), and an active member of several international professional associations. She was a fellow at the Institute for Personality Disorders directed by Otto Kernberg in New York in 2005–2006 and more recently a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, New York, in the fall 2018.

She is the author of various monographs on Shakespeare and psychoanalytic criticism, on feminine writing and theories of literature. Within the psychoanalytic field, her major publications in English are Beyond individual and collective trauma (Karnac, now Routledge, 2013) and Borderline bodies. Affect regulation therapy for personality disorders (Norton, 2018). Her fields of expertise are mainly trauma of human agency, intergenerational transmission, and personality disorders. She is co-editor of Unrepressed unconscious: Implicit memory and clinical work (Karnac, 2017), a project integrating neuroscience with psychoanalysis. She is also on the editorial board of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis, the International Forum of Psychoanalysis, and The wise baby/Il poppante saggio. She is on the teaching board of several training schools and supervisor in psychodynamic therapy in Italy, and also in the USA and the UK (Confer Books).

She is certified to conduct and score the Adult Attachment Interview (University of California, Berkeley, USA, training directed by M. Main and E. Hesse, under the guidance of D. Jakobvitz and N. Dazzi), and to score Reflective Functioning (after training under the guidance of H. Steele, New School for Social Research, New York).