Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension

306 Pages·2007·4.8 MB·English

by  Frances Sommer Anderson (Editor)

Bodies in
Treatment
Relational PeRsPectives Book seRies
Volume 36
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RELATIONAL PERSPECTIVES BOOK SERIES
LEWIS ARON AND ADRIENNE HARRIS
Series Editors
Charles Spezzano James S. Grotstein
Affect in Psychoanalysis: A Clinical Synthesis Who Is the Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream?
A Study of Psychic Presences
Neil Altman
The Analyst in the Inner City: Race, Class,and Stephen A. Mitchell
Culture Through a Psychoanalytic Lens Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity
Lewis Aron Peter G. M. Carnochan
A Meeting of Minds: Mutuality in Psychoanalysis Looking for Ground: Countertransference
and the Problem of Value in Psychoanalysis
Joyce A. Slochower
Holding and Psychoanalysis: A Relational Perspective Muriel Dimen
Sexuality, Intimacy, Power
Barbara Gerson, editor
The Therapist as a Person: Life Crises, Life Choices, Susan W. Coates, Jane L. Rosenthal, and Daniel S. Schechter,
Life Experiences, and Their Effects on Treatment editors
September 11: Trauma and Human Bonds
Charles Spezzano and Gerald J. Gargiulo, editors
Soul on the Couch: Spirituality, Religion, and Morality Randall Lehmann Sorenson
in Contemporary Psychoanalysis Minding Spirituality
Donnel B. Stern Adrienne Harris
Unformulated Experience: Gender as Soft Assembly
From Dissociation to Imagination in Psychoanalysis
Emanuel Berman
Stephen A. Mitchell
Impossible Training:
Influence and Autonomy in Psychoanalysis
A Relational View of Psychoanalytic Education
Neil J. Skolnick and David E. Scharff, editors
Carlo Strenger
Fairbairn, Then and Now
The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis
and Contemporary Identities
Stuart A. Pizer
Building Bridges: Negotiation of Paradox in Psychoanalysis
Lewis Aron and Adrienne Harris, editors
Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume II
Lewis Aron and Frances Sommer Anderson, editors
Relational Perspectives on the Body
Sebastiano Santostefano
Child Therapy in the Great Outdoors: A Relational View
Karen Maroda
Seduction, Surrender, and Transformation:
James T. McLaughlin
Emotional Engagement in the Analytic Process
The Healer’s Bent:
Solitude and Dialogue in the Clinical Encounter
Stephen A. Mitchell and Lewis Aron, editors
Relational Psychoanalysis: The Emergence of a Tradition
Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner
Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World
Rochelle G. K. Kainer
The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration
Sheldon Bach
Getting from Here to There:
Kenneth A. Frank
Psychoanalytic Explorations in Transitional Space
Psychoanalytic Participation: Action, Interaction,
and Integration
Katie Gentile
Sue Grand Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival
The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural
Perspective Melanie Suchet, Adrienne Harris, and Lewis Aron, editors
Relational Psychoanalysis, Volume III
Steven H. Cooper
Objects of Hope: Exploring Possibility and Limit Frances Sommer Anderson
in Psychoanalysis Bodies in Treatment: The Unspoken Dimension
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Bodies in
Treatment
The Unspoken Dimension
Edited by
Frances Sommer Anderson
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The Analytic Press The Analytic Press
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
270 Madison Avenue 27 Church Road
New York, NY 10016 Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA
© 2008 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑88163‑448‑8 (Hardcover)
No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming,
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the
publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data
Bodies in treatment / [edited by] Frances Sommer Anderson.
p. ; cm. ‑‑ (Relational perspectives book series ; v. 36)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978‑0‑88163‑448‑8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Psychoanalysis. 2. Mind and body therapies. I. Anderson, Frances Sommer,
1948‑ II. Series.
[DNLM: 1. Psychoanalytic Therapy‑‑methods. 2. Body Image. 3. Mind‑Body
Relations (Metaphysics) 4. Professional‑Patient Relations. WM 460.6 B667 2008]
RC504.B59 2008
616.89’17‑‑dc22 2007015768
Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at
http://www.taylorandfrancis.com
and The Analytic Press Web site at
http://www.analyticpress.com
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Dedication
In memory of
Donald M. Kaplan
With appreciation and affection for
Joyce McDougall
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Contributors xvii
Introduction xxi
1 At a Loss for Words and Feelings: A Psychoanalyst Reflects on
Experiencing Bodywork 1
Frances Sommer Anderson, PhD
Part I. Bodily Experience in Self-Organization:
Contemporary Views
2 Self in Action: The Bodily Basis of Self-Organization 29
William F. Cornell, MA, TSTA
3 The Role of Bodily Experience in Emotional Organization: New
Perspectives on the Multiple Code Theory 51
Wilma Bucci, PhD
Part II. Psychoanalysts Informed by Body-Based Modalities
4 Learning From Work With Individuals With a History of Trauma:
Some Thoughts on Integrating Body-Oriented Techniques and
Relational Psychoanalysis 79
Christopher B. Eldredge, MA, LCSW, and
Gilbert W. Cole, PhD, LCSW
vii
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viii Contents
5 The Coconstruction of “Psychoanalytical Choreography”
and the Dancing Self: Working With an Anorectic Patient 103
Maria Paola Pacifici, MD
6 Yoga and Neuro-Psychoanalysis 127
Patricia L. Gerbarg, MD
7 Sweet Are the Uses of Adversity: Psychic Integration Through
Body-Centered Work 151
Graham Bass, MA, APRN-BC
8 Coming Into Being: Employing the Wisdom of the Body and
Mind-Body Therapy 169
Helen M. Newman, PhD
Part III. Analysts Using Bodily Experience in the
Treatment Relationship
9 Tipping Points Between Body, Culture, and Subjectivity: The
Tension Between Passion and Custom 193
Steven H. Knoblauch, PhD
10 “We” Got Rhythm: Miming and the Polyphony of Identity in
Psychoanalysis 213
Gianni Nebbiosi, PhD, and Susanna Federici-Nebbiosi, PhD
Part IV. The Analyst’s Body as Object and Subject
11 When a Body Meets a Body: The Impact of the Therapist’s Body
on Eating-Disordered Patients 237
Jean Petrucelli, PhD
12 The Analyst’s Vulnerability: Preserving and Fine-Tuning Analytic
Bodies 255
Adrienne Harris, PhD, and Kathy Sinsheimer, MFT
Index 275
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Preface
Patients in pain or distress or confusion who seek the ministrations
of psychoanalytic therapists are ipso facto “bodies in treatment,” so
why has it taken psychoanalysts a century to attend systematically
to the somatic dimension of their caregiving? Of course, psycho­
analysis, the “talking cure,” took shape as a method of overcoming
repression and eliciting verbalizable insight. It was to be radically
differentiated from hypnosis, which relied on induced trance states
as a somatic precondition of the recovery of memories, typically
bodily memories. The traditional psychoanalytic method, with its
rule of abstinence, its mirror simile, its strictures about neutrality
and “evenly hovering attention,” and its surgical metaphor, was less a
coming together of people, bodies and all, than a disembodied chiro­
practic of the mind: a verbal manipulation to overcome resistance
and release tension with the goal of realigning a system of mental
energetics and reestablishing healthy energic flow.
From the mid­1930s on, a second factor reinforced analysts’ insen­
sitivity to the bodily dimension of psychological caregiving. To wit,
many analysts were uncomfortable with the invasive procedures of
the new somatic psychiatry and sought to differentiate the talking
cure from them. I have in mind Henry Cotton’s operative “defocal­
ization” of the allegedly infected tissue of institutionalized mental
patients; Manfred Sakel’s insulin­coma therapy; Ladislas Meduna’s
Metrazol­seizure therapy; Ugo Cerletti’s electroshock therapy; and
finally and most fatefully, Egas Moniz’s prefrontal lobotomy. To be
sure, there were analysts who not only endorsed the somatic therapies
but also devised ingenious (and strained) psychoanalytic rational­
izations of them. But prominent voices in the profession—William
Alanson White, Harry Stack Sullivan, and D. W. Winnicott among
them—spoke out against all the somatic treatments. They were
all too aware of the easy segue from bodies in treatment to bodies
ix
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