Presence of the body in psychoanalysis

In psychoanalysis, the psyche is conceived as an entity extended in space (Freud, 1940 [1938]). Apart from extending psychic activity beyond what is conscious, this spatial conception could of course mean the emerging of the psyche from the space of the body: Freud, in a well-known passage from the “Ego and the id,” writes: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” (Freud, 1923, p. 26). Also, the id is pictured “as being open at its end to somatic influences, and as there taking up into itself instinctual needs which find their psychical expression in it” (Freud, 1933 [1932], p. 79).

The anchoring of psychic activity in the body is portrayed in the Freudian concept of instinct (Trieb). He writes:

[It]appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body. (1915, p. 122)

Winnicott puts it as follows: “I suppose the word psyche … means the imaginative elaboration of somatic parts, feelings, and functions, that is, of physical aliveness” (Winnicott 1975, p. 243, Winnicott's italics). This kind of elaborative and integrative work is constituted already in the first experiences of life, when the self is organized having the union with the mother’s body as a starting point (Coblence, 2010). We could say that when we refer to the beginnings of psychic life, we refer to two bodies – the infant’s and the mother’s, initially perceived by the infant as one.

In this way the extension of the psyche derives not only from its bodily origin, but also from being “at the same time itself and a composing part of a dual unity” (Green 2010, p. 1506, my translation).

One could say that the continuity of this extended landscape – the indwelling of the psyche in the soma, according to Winnicott (1972), depends largely on the quality of the initial dual unity and on the imprint it leaves. We feel and detect this imprint in our analytic practice, and we may seek its forming in the early mother–infant relationship.

Concerning this relation, we should keep in mind that the mother’s psyche is also extended, including of course the experience of her body and the imprints of other relations – as is the relation with the father – in her internal landscape.

In this issue, in her article “The mother’s body, the role of pleasure in the mother–infant relationship, and the traumatic risk,” Ornella Piccini aims to consider the role of the body in motherhood. The author fathoms the question of pleasure and puts stress on the traumatic effect that the denial of the woman’s body can have for the mother–infant relationship.

The emergence of the psyche comprises separation from the mother’s body. Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that

“There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe,” because “just as the mother originally satisfied all the needs of the foetus through the apparatus of her own body, so now, after its birth, she continues to do so, though partly by other means” (Freud, 1926, p. 138). That is, if the separation from the mother’s body is experienced too early, the indwelling of the psyche in the soma is deeply affected.

In her article “Body relations and the Black Hole,” Judy Eekhoff describes the psychic Black Hole as a “primitive psychosomatic representation of undifferentiation and loss of the vanished mother of infancy” when awareness of separation from the mother comes “too soon.” While fathoming this psychic catastrophe, the author does not omit to underline the bodily and relational aspect of psychic experience.

Taking the skin-to-skin mother–infant relationship as a starting point, Jon Sletvold and Doris Brothers hold that “a sense of embodied wholeness is not possible outside of one’s body-to-body connections with others.” In their article “A new language for traumatic experience: From dissociation-enactment to the fracturing of embodied wholeness,” they suggest that “what is commonly referred to as ‘splitting’ is a bodily emotional reaction to painful, traumatizing experiences.”

The aftermath of traumatizing experiences, namely of “traumas of human agency,” forms the subject matter in the article “Intersubjectivity and psychopathology: Borderline and psychosomatic bodies ‘at the mind’s limits’,” by Clara Mucci. The author considers that the body–mind dissociation that is characteristic of borderline patients is also at work in psychosomatic disorders; according to Clara Mucci, in the latter “the body feels what the mind registers,” producing symptoms that stand for emotional pain, but with no symbolic dimension.

We have already mentioned separation from the initial bodily dual unity as a potentially traumatic yet indispensable experience for the emergence of the psyche. “The psyche is the effect of the relation of two bodies with one of them absent,” writes Andre Green (1995, p. 76). In my opinion, these last almost two years and one cannot avoid linking the psychic work the absence of the body of the other entails with the social distancing the COVID-19 pandemic imposed. As we all know, the psychoanalytic frame itself had to adjust to this imperative. In this issue, two texts attempt at dealing with the above situation – namely, via teleanalysis.

In her article “Our sudden switch to teleanalysis during a pandemic. Finding our psychoanalytic footing,” Lena Theodorou-Ehrlich fathoms the problems that the absence of the body of the other and the presence of danger for the body pose. The author puts stress on the internal frame of the analyst, which, when countertransferentially informed, can contain the anxieties caused to both members of the analytic couple by the new situation and explore in depth traumatic aspects of the patient’s psyche as revealed in the transference–countertransference dialectics.

According to Jill Savege Scharff, editor of the book Psychoanalysis online, interviewed by Gabriela Giustino, the lack of co-presence changes the analytic experience, and one has to “acknowledge the differences, explore them, mourn the losses.” Nevertheless, as transference, resistances, and countertransference are “projected onto the realities of technology,” then “despite the lack of physical co-presence in the same room, the body of patient and analyst do enter the analytic conversation.”

Working therapeutically with embodiment is the starting point of Frank Röhricht’s article “Psychoanalysis and body psychotherapy: An exploration of their relational and embodied common ground.” The author believes that psychoanalytic theory and practice are changing towards an embodied and enactive paradigm. He holds that, in this context, “the Analytical Body Psychotherapy as a therapy school locates itself firmly within the psychoanalytic framework.”