Response to Commentary

In her rich and thoughtful discussion, Beth Conklin adduces a mass of ethnographic evidence in support of the central contention of my “The Reassembly of the Body from Parts.” She writes that “the pervasive pairing and tensions between impulses toward tearing apart/consuming and desires for resurrection/repair reflect salient patterns in indigenous beliefs, myths, and rituals that posit dissolution/fragmentation as a prelude to new forms of wholeness.” She has grasped the essence of the destruction-reparation complex as I have described it. In addition, she notes that I have emphasized the link between cannibalistic imagery and depressive affect and focused on the power of body images to mediate the search for therapeutic ways of coping. As an author, I cannot have asked for more from a commentator than these generous acts of careful attention and intelligent understanding.

But Conklin has given us analysts a great deal more: (1) she confirms the potential value of psychoanalysis for shedding light on problems outside its clinical sphere; (2) she offers valuable critiques of “standard [psychoanalytic] interpretations”; and (3) she offers us a fascinating clinical hypothesis (actually, more than one) drawn from her ethnographic fieldwork. This last offering is highly unusual, if not unique: most often it is we analysts who offer interpretations to “neighboring” disciplines.

In “The Reassembly of the Body from Parts,” I identify a particular pairing and tension of ideas and their associated affects—a “destruction-reparation complex”—that first became evident to me in the course of my clinical psychoanalytic work. I demonstrated its presence there, and subsequently in Signorelli's Resurrection of the Flesh and Mann's What Remains. I had described some of its other expressions (e.g., in certain European myths and fairy tales) in my earlier work, to which Conklin refers. Conklin does not fault me for inappropriately “applying Western psychoanalytic frames to non-Western pe