Part II: Touch

That's my squeeze machine … some people call it my hug machine. … it exerts a firm but comfortable pressure on the body, from the shoulder to the knees.

As she lies in her machine … she feels that the machine opens a door into an otherwise closed emotional world and allows her, almost teaches her, to feel empathy for others.

Sometimes psychoanalysis comes to the ordinary common sense embarrassingly late. Tell someone not in the field that touch is crucial to human psychological and physical development and you'd get a contemptuous daa and yet we within the non-body, and particularly within the psychoanalytic, wing get singularly jittery and uneasy when touch comes to therapy. This can be the case even for those therapists who were trained in body therapies but whose current interests have led them to psychoanalysis. Indeed so uneasy are we about this, that we are either fuzzy and don't think about it or we have a set of rules around no touching as though that could resolve the issue. If we fall into the latter category, patients who touch us can become designated as rule-breakers and their wish to touch us or be touched by us can be interpreted callously as though their or our impulse were dreadfully wrong, pathological, boundary violating. By categorizing them in this way, we avoid engaging with what touch might be about. We move away from psychoanalysis's dictum to welcome and explore the meaning of things. Rather we can become threatened and deny ourselves access to crucial aspects of individual idiom, desire and need.

With a few exceptions, we psychoanalytic clinicians leave the discourse and theorizing about touch to the body-orientated therapists and we keep quiet about those hugs, the touch on the shoulder, the hand that needs holding, the kiss that got planted on us. In so doing we short-circuit an attempt to think about when and why we should or shouldn't touch. What