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This collection of essays explores the mind-body continuum in psychoanalysis. It arose from a series of seminars on embodiment held at the Washington School of Psychiatry and encompasses diverse points of view, although Lacanian perspectives are prominent. Since many of the contributors are affiliated with the Austen Riggs Center, it is not surprising that the clinical cases include more disturbed hospitalized individuals, with the spotlight on unusual clinical examples of embodiment such as self-mutilation, psychotic fragmentation, and mimicry.
A set of overarching questions runs through the collection: (1) Do our bodies determine how we think? If so, how does this happen and how does the body affect psychic structure? (2) What is the nature of metaphor, and can metaphor be considered a form of embodiment? (3) What is the role of language in the process of embodiment?
The central question of this book, the relationship of mind and body, has vexed philosophy and psychoanalysis from their beginnings. It is taken up most clearly in a lucid essay by Roger Frie, who traces the history of theorizing about “the lived body” from Freud, to the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ludwig Binswanger, to the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Frie reminds us that for Freud “the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego.” Yet subsequently ego psychology has promoted the split between Freud's bodily based drives and the ego. Moreover, the essential clinical tool in psychoanalysis—free association—has emphasized language and verbalization. To advance his argument against this split, Frie acquaints us with the work of Merleau-Ponty, who, he argues, collapses the Cartesian duality of mind and body. For Merleau-Ponty, the lived body is not an object for the subject, but the way in which the subject exists in the world. That is to say, the mind can be understood only in terms of the body. We experience the world in