The Analyst’s Body: A Relational Perspective From the Body

Abstract

This paper argues that the analyst’s own body is the essential foundation for our capacity to experience and communicate in the analytic situation. The analytic process is seen as a continuous process of registering, feeling and sensing what is happening and changing in the analyst’s body as she interacts with the patient, a process that largely proceeds beyond the bounds of conscious awareness. It is argued that therapeutic action is fundamentally dependent on the analyst’s ability and freedom to respond immediately—verbally and nonverbally—to the patient’s emotions, actions, and verbalizations. The importance of reflective thought is acknowledged but is seen as resting on the analyst’s ability to gain awareness of unconscious bodily relational experiences. On the basis of these assumptions, it is suggested that analytic training and supervision, in addition to its traditional emphasis on the exchange of words, should focus on sensitizing analysts to embodied experiences and expressions.

Keywords:

• bodily
• embodied analysis
• enactment
• relational experience
• unconscious

Notes

¹ With reference to this same vignette I titled an article published in Norwegian (Sletvold, 2013b) “Sier du det!” a common interjection in Norwegian. Translated literally, it means “say you so!” My English language consultant Christopher Saunders suggested, “You don’t say!”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon Sletvold

Jon Sletvold, PsyD, is Faculty, Training and Supervising Analyst at the Norwegian Character Analytic Institute. He has published articles on the role of the body in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in national and international journals and is coeditor of two books. He is the author of The Embodied Analyst: From Freud and Reich to Relationality (Routledge, 2014), which was the 2015 Gradiva Award winner.