The Interplay of Subsymbolic and Symbolic Processes in Psychoanalytic Treatment: It Takes Two to Tango—But Who Knows the Steps, Who's The Leader? The Choreography of the Psychoanalytic Interchange

Abstract

Analyst and patient each come to the session with a set of emotion schemas, rooted in subsymbolic bodily and emotional experience, developed in the interpersonal interactions of their lives, and activated in the relational context of the session. Subsymbolic processes are systematic, organized forms of thought that continue to develop throughout life and that may occur within as well as outside of awareness. Argentine tango and the teaching of tango present optimal examples of processes that are systematic and subsymbolic, that occur within awareness and underly the intersection of internal organization and interpersonal communication. The goals of treatment include new integration of emotion schemas that have been dissociated in response to chronic or acute trauma or stress and new resolutions of earlier solutions that have proven maladaptive in the current contexts of life. In the analytic interchange, as in the complex interactions of the tango, subsymbolic communication provides the guide to bodily and emotional exploration and integration. In the treatment, the subsymbolic communications potentially open new connections to the symbolic mode, which then feed back to deepen the subsymbolic explorations, and new, emergent shared schemas are constructed.

Notes

¹Artistic Director and Choreographer, New Direction Dance Company.

²Conference of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association, Rome, 2007.