Body to Body: Discussion of “’Tis Beauty Kills the Beast” by Susanne Chassay

Abstract

Following upon Chassay’s concerns about the viability of sensory communication in claustrum states, I elaborate on her distinction between sensations that serve as fuel for claustrum states and those that serve the meaning-making “containment” function. I suggest that a proto-symbolic registering of incipient meaning may germinate within sense experience itself, prior to the constellation of specific affects and symbolic meaning, as a form of intersomatic subjectivity. I argue that the interpellative aspects of social reality—”the psyche-in-the-body-in-the-social”—create a “somatic delinking” that forecloses this mutually enlivening, aesthetic exchange.

Notes

¹ I am very grateful to Stephen Hartman, who generously welcomed us to submit our respective papers to Studies in Gender and Sexuality for possible publication.

² The psychic retreat of the claustrum was first articulated by Meltzer (1990).

³ After discussing the “proto-symbolic” potential of sensory experience in the original version of this discussion in 2012, I was pleased to subsequently read Cartwright’s (2010) work on “proto-containment” and “proto-symbolic” processes, which had been unfamiliar to me. See a fuller discussion of his work in the next section.

⁴ See Sweetnam (2007) for a more complete, in my view, elaboration of aesthetic experience.

⁵ A character in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of C. S. Lewis’ (2003) space trilogy.

⁶ I am grateful to Ghent (1990) for imbuing this moving poem segment with such rich psychoanalytic meaning. I have inserted a phrase from the translation used by Ghent, substituting “we are still just able to bear” from the David Young (Rilke, 1978) translation of “we can still bear.”

⁷ Davoine and Gaudilliere (2004) noted, “Children … are very quick to detect the zones of petrification, even transient ones, of those who are supposed to be caring for them. They may express this in sometimes bizarre statements that are worth questioning, with an acute perception of the blanks in the other that is perhaps registered by what Damasio (1995) calls ‘somatic markers’” (p. 49).

⁸ I am grateful to Barbara Blasdel, Ph.D., for bringing Civitarese’s use of this term to my awareness.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karen Peoples

Karen Peoples, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a Personal and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where she is also on the faculty.