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MRS KLEIN: Tears, you know, are very much equated with excreta in the unconscious mind. Through tears the mourner casts bad objects into the outside world.
What happens to the struggling psyche when tears are not available? Raffaella Hilty has previously explored an interest in bodily communications in an article originally published in the British Journal of Psychotherapy in 2020 and included here in a slightly extended form (Hilty, 2020). Within this, she describes work with a patient, ‘Mark’, who communicates his unloved state in the form of an almost unbearable stench. She comes to understand the smell as ‘an expression of embodied memories communicating traumatic experiences of early physical and emotional neglect, as well as evacuating the toxicity of these experiences’ (p. 99). I was struck by her ability to meld traditional psychoanalytic concepts with this area—human body odour—that might be overlooked or too embarrassing to stay with.
The current volume takes that interest further, gathering a collection of papers that explore the ways that the body becomes the mode of communication, whether through smell, physical actions such as spitting, excreting, masturbation or via eating disorders, which are included as ‘an expression of the use of the body to communicate unbearable psychic distress’ (p. xxviii).
Hilty addresses the problematic aspects of the term ‘primitive’ with its connotations of inferiority, and of colonial racism, explaining that ‘this book does not refer to bodily communications as primitive because we see them as inferior to verbal language, but simply because they point to the beginnings of psychological development’ (p. xxvi). Some of the clinical material describes people who are institutionalised, and marginalised, in society, and is therefore different in character to work where, in one case, the therapist collaborates with the patient to think together about their long-term therap