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In 2003 Susie Orbach suggested at the Bowlby Memorial Conference that there is no such thing as a body. I distinctly remember the cutting-edge feel of the conference and that we were pushing at the boundaries of what psychoanalytic psychotherapy could dare to contemplate. The body therapists present encouraged us to expand the paradigm. This was not just about the symptomatic ailing body of a given client but the entire notion of embodiment within a two-person framework. There is no longer the retreat to the safe haven of the baby body, the body of the other, the perverted body; we were talking about our own bodies with characteristic gauche Britishness! Our desiring, yearning, failing, containing multifaceted bodies as they were engaged in our lives and work. I left considering my own body, a journey which continues.
So with small steps began the integration of attachment and psychoanalytic theory with the real-world understanding that is characteristic of Orbach's invaluable contribution. Her question ‘How do we get a body?’ frames the ongoing mission to understand our corporeality.
Asking this question of students training at The Bowlby Centre I have encouraged the exploration of their own bodies and have had the privilege of their sharing some revealing and moving body narratives. To tell of one's body is to go to the heart of a person's history, and human frailty and mortality. I hope that by appreciating their felt sense of their body to facilitate a starting point for being open to the inevitable bodily countertransferences, to be able to unpick what is being communicated non-verbally, to recognize emotions as they are felt in the body. Similarly in my work with clients, thinking about the thread of an individual's story as framed by their actual bodily experience and