Can We Talk? Commentary on “The Body/Mind Dialectic within the Psychoanalytic Subject: Finding the Analyst's Voice” by Harriet Kimble Wrye

In a formulation that is often noted yet infrequently applied, Freud (1923) put forth the idea that, “The ego was first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself a projection of a surface” (p. 26). In her recent contributions, Harriet Wrye (Wrye and Wells, 1989, 1994; Wrye, 1997) has rescued this observation from the realms of metapsychology and put it to clinical use through her observations of and allowance for patients’ quests to experience their deep longings for a bodily based sense of contact and aliveness within the analytic process. In these endeavors, Wrye has brought us the immeasurably helpful concept of the “maternal erotic transference” and has delineated the variety of manifestations and reactions that both patients and analysts have to the fundamental processes of relating in the medium of presymbolic bodily states. In her current work, Wrye (1997) emphasizes the necessary creation of a “play-space” within the analytic process in which the patient may bask in “the physicality of the voice” and thereby benefit from immersion in a transitional world of fluid engagement with experiences of inside/outside, fantasy/reality, self/other, and body/mind. In her descriptions of this mode of interacting, Wrye consistently uses terms that emphasize the fact that these states are themselves fluid (e.g., “transient mutually related regressions,” “at certain times”), coming and going according to the exigencies of the treatment process. In addition, she suggests that transitional states of immersion in the sensuous qualities of the sounds and rhythms of voice “also serve evocative memory in the construction and maintenance of object constancy and in the development of the capacity to symbolize.”

There is, however, a striking shift from this perspective when Wrye goes on to discuss some clinical material extracted from my paper (Gerson, 1996).