Dancing with the Shadow of the Object: Tango as a Means of Embodied Symbolization– Commentary of Dawn Farber’s “Psychoanalysis and Tango: Complex Arts of Grief Therapy”

ABSTRACT

In my discussion of Dawn Farber’s evocative essay on Tango and Psychoanalysis (this issue) I focus on the body and its affective repertoire as well as its sensorial physicality as our first means of knowing and the primary channel for the symbolization of affect that remains unformulated and is connected to the loss of primary attachments.

This article refers to:

Psychoanalysis and Tango: Complex Arts of Grief Therapy-- Psychoanalysis and Tango Dancing during This Pandemic

View responses to this article:

Responses to My Discussants’ Papers

Notes

¹ Farber (this issue 2021) speaks of learning Spanish in order to understand Tango lyrics and finding it a language that captures the complex texture of feelings. I quite agree that romance languages like Spanish offer multiple signifiers that embroider the use of language with emotional significance.

² I am using the term as defined by Bucci in discussing implicit memory and what is “known” affectively within the patient-analyst relationship.

³ Atlas and Benjamin have addressed the regulatory function involved in mutual recognition as it applies to physical connection with another (see Benjamin & Atlas, 2015).

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Notes on contributors

Velleda C. Ceccoli

Velleda C. Ceccoli, Ph.D., is on the faculties of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, The Stephen Mitchell Center, and The institute for Relational and Self Psychologies in Milan, Italy. She is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and has published a number of journal articles on language, trauma, dissociation, sexuality and erotic experience. Her ongoing blog Out of My Mind focuses on psychoanalysis and its relevance today.